Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Connecticut, where she directs the Reducing Information Ecosystem Threats (RIET) Lab.
Dr. Dori-Hacohen’s research focuses on threats to the information ecosystem online and the sociotechnical AI alignment problem, while fostering transdisciplinary collaborations with experts spanning medicine, public health, the social sciences, and the humanities. She is a recognized expert in information ecosystem threats; AI safety; and sociotechnical AI alignment; and has published extensively on these topics. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Google, among others; she has served as PI or Co-PI on $7.7M worth of federal funds from the NSF.
Dr. Dori-Hacohen is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2011 Google Lime Scholarship and first place at the 2016 UMass Amherst’s Innovation Challenge. Her AI safety & ethics work has won the AI Risk Analysis Award at the ML Safety Workshop @ NeurIPS 2022; Best Poster Award at the Workshop on Safe and Trustworthy AI (STAI) @ ICLP 2023; and was cited in the March 2023 AI Open Letter calling for a pause on AI development. Dr. Dori-Hacohen was named to the 2023 D-30 Disability Impact List for her “groundbreaking ‘Fairness via AI’ research [which] utilizes machine learning to study and mitigate inequities at scale.”
Previously, she was the Founder & Executive Chairwoman at AuCoDe for 2 years, after serving as its Founder/CEO for over 5 years. She also ran a boutique AI consulting firm for 2 years which was profitable from day 1. She is also the co-inventor of four patents. Her career in academia, entrepreneurship, and industry spans Google, Facebook (now Meta), and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst among others. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (cum laude) at the University of Haifa in Israel and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she researched computational models of controversy.
As a disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent scholar in a majority-men field, she has taken an active leadership role in broadening participation in Computer Science on a local and global scale, as the co-founder of two large peer mentorship organizations, Graduate Women in STEM @ UMass and Women in Information Retrieval, both active organizations to date with hundreds of members each. Most recently, she has founded Disabled In Computing, a peer mentorship organization offering resources and mutual support for disabled, neurodivergent, and/or chronically ill folks. She has been quoted and interviewed as an expert in multiple media outlets including Reuters, The Guardian, Forbes, and Galei Tzahal radio (in Hebrew). She is married and has two school-age children.
Dr. Dori-Hacohen’s full CV is available here. For the most up-to-date publication list, please see Google Scholar.
Currently Hiring! Dr. Dori-Hacohen is always seeking proactive, curious prospective PhD students who get things done, to join her research lab. Read more and apply.
“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.