Ph.D. student profile: Luke Rodriguez
Luke Rodriguez is a Ph.D. student at the iSchool.
When you meet someone who doesn’t know about your research, how do you describe it?
I develop algorithms to help people use data more responsibly, by creating datasets with provable privacy and bias claims.
Who is the faculty member working closest with you? What are you learning from him/her?
From Bill Howe I've learned how to communicate about and push research that does not fit cleanly into any particular conference or research community.
Why are you interested in this subject?
I believe that it's important that we critically examine how we do data science as the field grows in popularity, and a core part of that is looking closely at the datasets that we use.
What impact do you hope to make in the information field through your research/dissertation?
I would like to see data scientists, researchers, and analysts think more thoroughly and carefully about what we really want out of our data, and whether careful transformations of that data can improve its usefulness rather than degrade it.
What surprised you the most when digging into your research?
How few people in the data science research space are focusing on people! I firmly believe that the most important data science skills are about people and communication, and our research community should reflect that.
What are your career goals once you graduate?
Work in industry on a data science team, where I can bring the practices from my research to applied problems and help do data science in a people-first way.