Alice Chao-Wei Huang, who earned her PhD from the department in 2024 and is now a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Embedded Ethics Program, received the John Leyerle-CIFAR Prize for Interdisciplinary Research. The selection committee, composed of graduate appointed professors at the University of Toronto, awarded her the prize for her exceptional doctoral dissertation, titled “Diversity in the Time of Data,” supervised by Jonathan Weisberg, and its significant, original contributions both to the academic community and to Canadian society.
Our society has undergone drastic changes in the past few decades, and we have access to more data today than ever before. In her doctoral thesis, Huang focuses on three projects surrounding the new social problems that derive from the new choices and power resulting from this extended access to data:
- Expertise–who can we trust as we encounter vast amounts of information?
- Diversity–how can we understand, using a dynamic computational model, the interactions between different types of diversity in practical decisions?
- Fairness & Accuracy–must there be a trade-off between fairness and accuracy in machine learning?
The John Leyerle-CIFAR Prize for Interdisciplinary Research was established to honour John Leyerle, the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) in the late 1970s, who played an instrumental role in founding the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in 1978. This prize recognizes an excellent student clearly producing outstanding interdisciplinary research.
Congratulations, Alice!
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