Cathy O'Neil


Cathy O'Neil talk photos

On Tuesday, March 29, 2022, big data scientist and New York Times best-selling author, Cathy O’Neil, shared “Algorithms Don’t Predict the Future, They Cause the Future” to a campus and community audience in the Dreyfus University Center and via webinar.

Copies of Dr. O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction are available for purchase from UWSP Bookstore. Her latest book, The Shame Machine—Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, is available through University Libraries in Overdrive: eBook and audiobook. 

Cathy O'Neil books


 


Cathy O'Neil

Cathy O'Neil

Big Data Scientist
Algorithm Expert
New York Times Best-selling Author

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for Risk Metrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lead Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.