Steven Wu

Assistant Professor, Software and Societal Systems

Bio

Steven Wu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with an appointment in the Software and Societal Systems Department (in the Societal Computing program), and affiliated appointments with the Machine Learning Department and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was co-advised by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth. His doctoral dissertation received Penn's Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award for the best thesis. He is a recipient of an Amazon Research Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, a J.P. Morgan Faculty Award, a Facebook Research Award, and a Mozilla Research Grant. Before CMU, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research-New York City in the Machine Learning and Algorithmic Economics groups.

Research

My research studies the societal aspects of machine learning. My recent work focuses on (1) how to make machine learning better aligned with societal values, especially privacy and fairness, and (2) how to make machine learning more reliable and robust when algorithms interact with social and economic dynamics. I study these questions using methods and models from machine learning, statistics, optimization, differential privacy, game theory, and mechanism design.