I'm a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University.
I'm also the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Interim Executive Director of EAI.
Research
My group's research interests revolve around algorithmic auditing. We develop methodologies and study the real-world systems that millions of users interact with every day, focusing on issues of algorithmic discrimination, fairness, and privacy. We aim to enable regulators, policymakers, and everyday people to better understand how these systems work, how they are used and abused, and what impacts they are having on users and society at large.
I have testified before Congress and briefed members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on algorithmic fairness. I was a plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit that successfully challenged the constitutionality of the CFAA for online anti-discrimination research. My work has received over 25,000 citations, identified behaviors that were addressed in the FTC's $5B settlement with Facebook as well as the DOJ's Fair Housing Act (FHA) lawsuit against Meta (the first time DOJ has charged an algorithm with FHA violations).
Our research is generously funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Reseach Office, Narus, Google, the Data Transparency Lab, and Amazon Web Services.
Teaching
I've taught a number of courses, including CS 2500 Fundamentals of Computer Science 1, CS3700 Networks and Distributed Systems (and its precursor CS3600 Systems and Networks), CS4700/CS5700 Fundamentals of Computer Networks, CS5600 Computer Systems, and CS5750/IS4700 Social Computing.
Service
I have served on the program committees of many conferences, including (most recently) IMC'25 and PETS'26. I will be serving as the Program Committee Co-Chair for IMC'26.
Outside of academia, I served as Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Privacy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during most of 2023 and 2024, where I worked on AI, privacy, and government use of technology. I was also a Senior Privacy Expert at the Federal Trade Commission.
Within Northeastern, I have served in numerous administrative roles in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, including most recently as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. I am also serving as Interim Executive Director for the Institute of Experiential Artificial Intelligence.
Advising
I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to work with a number of talented students, postdocs, and research scientists. These include my current research scientist Piotr Sapieżyński, as well as Ph.D. students Levi Kaplan and Nicole Gerzon.
I also had the pleasure of advising Taejoong Chung (now at Virginia Tech), Bimal Viswanath (co-advised with Krishna P. Gummadi; now at Virgina Tech), Ancsa Hannák (co-advised with David Lazer; now at University of Zurich), Yabing Liu (now at Twitter), Liang Zhang (now at Google), Arash Molavi Kakhki (co-advised with Dave Choffnes; now at ThousandEyes), Muhammad Ali (now at Amazon), Lulu Kiffer (co-advised with Rajmohan Rajaraman; now at IMDEA), and Giridhari Venkatadri (now at Meta).
Contact
177 Huntington AveOffice 409
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
Map Directions
Core Faculty, Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute
Core Faculty, Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence
Bio
CV
Google Scholar
Diversions
I'm a sucker for nice data visualizations. I've worked on a few using Twitter data, including a visualization of the U.S. mood, and a a map of over 250 million geo-tags.