Unai Fischer Abaigar
Faculty Fellow and Data Science Assistant Professor at NYU CDS
The goal of my research is to develop rigorous theoretical and empirical foundations for AI in the public sphere. I organize my work around methodologies for evaluating AI in society and empirical partnerships with public agencies.
On the methodological side, I develop frameworks that quantify the value prediction brings to public programs, asking not how accurate a model is but whether investing in prediction is the best way to improve the program. On the empirical side, I have built partnerships across the public sector to test these ideas on real-world data, including work on employment offices, on refugee resettlement, and on cash transfer targeting in developing economies.
I completed my PhD in Statistics at LMU Munich, where I was part of the Social Data Science and AI Lab and was advised by Christoph Kern and Frauke Kreuter. My doctoral work was supported by the Konrad Zuse School for Excellence in Reliable AI and the Munich Center for Machine Learning.
During my PhD, I was a visiting fellow at Harvard SEAS and its Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), hosted by Cynthia Dwork, and a visitor at MIT LIDS, hosted by Sendhil Mullainathan and Juan Carlos Perdomo. I hold a BSc and MSc in Physics from Heidelberg University and previously worked at the Hertie School Data Science Lab.
