June 2, 2022
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has awarded Manish Raghavan, MS ’18, Ph.D. ’21 the 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation "The Societal Impacts of Algorithmic Decision-Making," which makes significant contributions to the understanding of algorithmic decision making and its societal implications, including foundational results on issues of algorithmic bias and fairness.
Algorithmic fairness is an area within AI that has generated a great deal of public and media interest. Despite being at a very early stage of his career, Raghavan has been one of the leading figures shaping the direction and focus of this line of research.
Raghavan received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell where he was advised by Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science. Raghavan is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. His primary interests lie in the application of computational techniques to domains of social concern, including algorithmic fairness and behavioral economics, with a particular focus on the use of algorithmic tools in the hiring pipeline.
Presented annually, the Doctoral Dissertation Award recognizes the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering and is accompanied by a prize of $20,000. Dimitris Tsipras of Stanford University, Pratul Srinivasan of Google Research, and Benjamin Mildenhall of Google Research received Honorable Mention honors.