Yuval Moskovitch named 2021 EECS Rising Star

Postdoctoral researcher Yuval Moskovitch has been selected to participate in the annual EECS Rising Stars program, hosted this year by MIT. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs with historically marginalized or underrepresented genders who are interested in pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making. Moskovitch was accepted based on her research on reliable, data-driven decision tools.

Moskovitch works in the Database Research Group led by Prof. H. V. Jagadish. Her research is centered around data management, advanced database applications provenance, and process analysis. In her current research she focuses on data management for fairness and responsible data science. 

Ubiquitous data has led to widespread use of automated, data-driven decision-making tools, which have gradually supplanted humans in a range of application domains. These include deciding who should get a loan, automated hiring, student grading, and even assessing the risk of paroling convicted criminals. Growing dependence on these tools, particularly in domains where algorithmic decision-making can affect human life, raises concerns about their reliability. A large number of recent cases have raised criticisms that these tools are biased or can discriminate unfairly. 

Moskovitch develops methods that intervene in the development pipeline of data-driven systems at different points – from the data collection phase, to the data analysis and assessment of the Machine Learning model. Her proposed methods allow users to tackle various sources of bias by: determining fitness-for-use of data before the model training; analyzing the performance of the model to detect groups that are treated unfairly; and assessing the quality of the results of aggregation queries which are commonly used by analysts throughout the development of data-driven decision tools.

Moskovitch obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Deutch. She completed a BSc in Software Engineering and MSc in Computer Science at Ben Gurion University. Moskovitch is the recipient of several awards including the Shulamit Aloni Scholarship for Advancing Women in Science by the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology and the Data Science Fellowship for outstanding postdocs of the planning and budgeting committee of the council for higher education.