Welcome!

I am a Computing Innovation Fellow at Harvard University where I am jointly hosted by Les Valiant and Yiling Chen. Having grown up in Boston, I'm excited to be back home for a while!

In 2010 I will join the Computer Science Department at UCLA as an assistant professor. I'm pretty excited about that too! If you are a current or newly admitted UCLA student and my research sounds interesting to you, please feel free to contact me.

Research Interests

My main research interests are in machine learning, computational economics, social network theory, and algorithms, all of which I primarily study using techniques from theoretical computer science. A lot of my favorite problems have involved developing new models of learning, or examining old models from a new perspective.

My doctoral dissertation, Learning from Collective Preferences, Behavior, and Beliefs, introduced a series of new learning models and algorithms designed to address the problems commonly faced when aggregating local information across large population.

At Harvard, I am a member of the EconCS group and the Theory Group, and an affiliate of the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

For a more complete picture of my research, take a look at my publications or my (slightly outdated) research statement.

Background

I received my Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August, 2009. I was extremely lucky to be advised by Michael Kearns. During my time at Penn, I spent two fun summers interning in New York, first with the Machine Learning and Microeconomics groups at Yahoo! Research and then in the research group at Google.

Before coming to Penn, I completed a Masters in Computer Science at Stanford where I got my first taste of research working with the Multiagent Group. Further back in the day, I was a carefree undergrad at BU.

You may remember me as Jenn Wortman. I recently got married! My husband Jeff is also at Harvard this year.

Get In Touch

Email: jenn at seas.harvard.edu

Office: Maxwell Dworkin 140, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138