Tom van Neunen, Researcher in Residence, is a Lecturer in Computational Social Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his research, he focuses on robust interpretative methods for big social data, having taught courses and workshops across the world, including in Berkeley, Shanghai, Copenhagen and Sydney. For the past three years, Tom has participated in state-of-the-art research on AI discrimination and bias, as a postdoctoral fellow on the cross-disciplinary, EPSRC-funded ‘Discovering and Attesting Digital Discrimination’ project at King’s College London.

Tom’s time at REPHRAIN will be spent on his INTERSECT project, a summary of which can be found below:

A substantive and growing body of evidence shows how automated computational systems treat users unfairly, unethically or just differently based on their personal data, contributing to discriminatory or otherwise repressive practices. Risk assessments of these systems need to be grounded in the real-world experiences of vulnerable individuals. This project investigates public perceptions of unfair treatment by automated computational systems, as encountered in everyday life. The findings from semi-structured interviews conducted as part of this project will be integrated into REPHRAIN’s data infrastructure.