Arts Politics & Government

Cathy O'Neil: Do Algorithms Perpetuate Human Bias?

9:30am January 26, 2018

by NPR/TED Staff

Cathy O'Neil on the TED Stage. Bret Hartman / TED

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Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Can We Trust The Numbers?

About Cathy O'Neil's TED Talk

Mathematician Cathy O'Neil says algorithms embed existing bias into code — with potentially destructive outcomes. Everyone should question their fairness, not just computer scientists and coders.

About Cathy O'Neil

Cathy O'Neil is a mathematician, data scientist, and author of the blog mathbabe.org.

After receiving a PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1999, she taught at Barnard and MIT. She then went on to work as a hedge fund analyst, and later a data scientist, designing algorithms for targeted ads.

O'Neil is the author of several data science books, such as Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.