About

Dr. James Foulds is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. His research aims to improve the role of artificial intelligence in society regarding fairness and privacy, and to promote the practice of computational social science. He received the NSF CAREER and CRII awards for his work on fairness and bias in artificial intelligence. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by the University of California, San Diego. His master's and bachelor's degrees were earned with first-class honours at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he also contributed to the Weka data mining system.

Research interests

My research interests are broadly in the area of socially conscious machine learning and artificial intelligence. My work aims to improve AI’s role in society regarding fairness and privacy, and to promote the practice of computational social science, using probabilistic models and Bayesian inference.

Teaching interests

Machine learning, data mining, artificial intelligence

Education

  • PostdocUniversity of California, San Diego (2017)
  • Postdoc, Computer ScienceUniversity of California, Santa Cruz (2015)
  • Ph D, Computer ScienceUniversity of California, Irvine (2014)
    Latent Variable Modeling for Networks and Text: Algorithms, Models and Evaluation Techniques
  • MS, Computer ScienceUniversity of Waikato (2008)
    Learning Instance Weights in Multi-Instance Learning
  • Other, Computer ScienceUniversity of Waikato (2006)
    Learning to play the game of go