How Big Data Threatens Democracy

Cathy O’Neil is a data scientist and author of the blog Mathbabe.org. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. She then worked as a data scientist at various start-ups, building models that predict people’s purchases and clicks. Cathy started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia University and is the author of Doing Data Science. She appears weekly on the Slate Money podcast. Her new book is Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Cathy O’Neil is in the Northwest to speak at Town Hall Seattle tonight at 7:30pm, presented by Town Hall and Elliott Bay Book Company as part of the Civics series.