The Most Important Question

Finding the Humanity in Artificial Intelligence


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If you had all of the data in the world at your hands, what question would you ask first?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Emma Pierson.

Emma is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and a computer science field member at Cornell University with a secondary joint appointment as an assistant professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College. Sure. Why not?

Emma has published a number of game-changing papers, and we talk about those today and how they all tie together. She's written for the New York Times, 538, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wired, all my favorites, and has been named to the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 list, and the Forbes 30 under 30 in Science list.

Her team's work has helped unlock answers and solutions to some of our biggest, most lingering and also sometimes most urgent questions.

Emma and her team work diligently to develop data science and machine learning methods to study two vital, huge interlocking areas: inequality and healthcare.

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INI Book Club:

  • The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

  • Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

  • Links:

    • Follow Emma on Twitter

    • Keep up with Emma's work on her website

    • Follow us:

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      • Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett

      • Edited by Anthony Luciani

      • Produced by Willow Beck

      • Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

      • Find our more about our guests here: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/guest-stats

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