Safiya Noble | |
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Known for | Algorithms of Oppression |
Awards | MacArthur Fellow |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | California State University, Fresno University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Thesis | Searching for black girls: old traditions in new media (2012) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of California,Los Angeles |
Website | https://safiyaunoble.com/ |
Safiya Umoja Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies,African American Studies,and Information Studies at the University of California,Los Angeles. She is the director of the UCLA Center on Race &Digital Justice and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech &Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She serves as interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative,leading work in critical data studies.
Noble is the author of a bestselling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines,entitled Algorithms of Oppression:How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press),which has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021,she was recognized as a MacArthur Fellow for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic bias.
She is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative,which serves those vulnerable to online harassment,and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute,where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022,she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.
She was appointed a commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance in 2020. [1] In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity at the World Economic Forum. [2]
Noble grew up in Fresno,California. [3] She went on to study sociology at California State University,Fresno with a focus on African American studies and ethnic studies. [4] While at Fresno State,Noble was involved with the "campus political scene," protesting against apartheid and campaigning for racial equality and gender equality. [3] She was a member of the Associated Students,Inc. and the California State Student Association. [5] After she graduated,Noble worked for more than a decade in multicultural marketing,advertising,and public relations. [6]
Noble attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for graduate studies where she earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in library and information science. [3] [7] Her 2012 dissertation,Searching for black girls:old traditions in new media,considered how gender and race manifest on technology platforms. [8]
Noble was appointed assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of African-American Studies,the Department of Media and Cinema Studies,and the Institute for Communication Research. [8] Noble joined the University of California,Los Angeles's Department of Information Studies in 2014. [9] She was awarded the University of California,Los Angeles Early Career Award in 2016. [10] [11] The same year she was appointed a Hellman Fellow. [12] Noble received academic tenure at UCLA and was promoted to associate professor in 2018. [13]
Noble joined the University of Southern California from 2017 to 2019 as a visiting assistant professor. [14] At USC,she focused on the politics and human and civil rights concerns of digital media platforms,which includes the integration of these issues in STEM education. [15]
On 25 September 2020,Noble was named as one of the 25 members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board,an independent monitoring group for Facebook. [16] In October 2020,she was featured in conversation with Meghan,Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry,Duke of Sussex on the harms of technology,and her book Algorithms of Oppression was cited by Meghan,Duchess of Sussex for outlining how "the digital space really shapes our thinking about race." [17] [18]
Noble was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. [19]
Noble's academic research focuses on the Internet and its impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary,marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race,gender,culture,power,and technology. Her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias has been covered by Rolling Stone , [20] The Guardian , BBC , CNN International , [21] USA Today , [22] Wired, [23] Full Frontal with Samantha Bee , [24] and The New York Times . [25] Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies. [26]
Her research also focuses on gender,technology,and culture,and how they influence the design and use of the internet. [27] Her work has appeared in academic publications and popular media outlets including Time [28] and Bitch. [29] Noble co-edited the books Emotions,Technology &Design and The Intersectional Internet:Race,Sex,Culture andClass Online. [30] [31] She is the co-editor of the "Commentary &Criticism" section of the journal Feminist Media Studies . She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards including for Taboo:The Journal of Culture and Education,and the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. [11] [9]
Noble's first book, Algorithms of Oppression ,was published by NYU Press in 2018 and has been reviewed in journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and was featured in the New York Public Library 2018 Best Books for Adults. [32] [33] [34] It considers how bias against people of color is embedded into supposedly neutral search engines. [34] It explores how racism,especially Anti-Black racism,is generated,maintained,and reproduced by the internet. [28] [35] In it,Noble is concerned with looking at the ways the Black community is commercialized by technology companies. She focuses on companies like Google and Facebook and how their algorithms "black-box" information;for example,when a search term is entered,it is unclear how results for the search are derived. Her work aims to change the perceptions of marginalized people in technology. [36] She blogged about "Digital Infrastructures of Race and Gender" for the Fotomuseum's online platform. [37] She has also given talks and interviews about Algorithms of Oppression . [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43]
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Robert Epstein is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology by Harvard University in 1981, was editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, and has held positions at several universities including Boston University, University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. He is also the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, MA. In 2012, he founded the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a nonprofit organization that conducts research to promote the well-being and functioning of people worldwide.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.
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Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).
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Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.
Meredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism.
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Julia Angwin is an American investigative journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She co-founded and was editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology on society. She was a staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013, during which time she was on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She worked as a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2014 to April 2018, during which time she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Mary Chayko is an American sociologist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She is the director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information and she was a six-year Faculty Fellow in Residence at the Rutgers-New Brunswick Honors College (2017-2023). She is an affiliated faculty member of the Sociology Department and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers.
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Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Michigan School of Information. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.
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