Hi!

Profile picture of Rachel Hong

I am a fourth-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Washington, where I work with Professors Jamie Morgenstern and Tadayoshi Kohno on topics intersecting machine learning and society. My research broadly focuses on how machine learning systems purposefully or unintentionally harm specific populations, along dimensions such as fairness, consent, or privacy. I have worked on auditing data collection practices and demonstrating how relying on external machine learning models can contribute to discriminatory behavior in downstream models. Through my research, I have interned on the Responsible AI research teams at Amazon and Meta FAIR, and I am grateful to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Before joining UW, I worked as an engineer at TeachFX, a startup that uses voice AI to help teachers reflect on their practice. My undergraduate degree was in Computer Science at Harvard University, where I had the amazing opportunity to work on algorithmic fairness with Professors Cynthia Dwork and Pragya Sur.