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Publications

At the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, we publish academic papers and general-interest pieces on a variety of issue at the nexus of public policy, computer science, and statistics. Below is a sampling of this work, categorized by topic.

Discrimination & Fairness
The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness: A Critical Review of Fair Machine Learning
Sam Corbett-Davies, Sharad Goel
Learning to be Fair: A Consequentialist Approach to Equitable Decision-Making
Alex Chohlas-Wood, Madison Coots, Emma Brunskill, Sharad Goel
Code
Omitted and Included Variable Bias in Tests for Disparate Impact
Jongbin Jung, Sam Corbett-Davies, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel
A Causal Framework for Observational Studies of Discrimination
Johann Gaebler, William Cai, Guillaume Basse, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel, Jennifer Hill
Code
Breaking Taboos in Fair Machine Learning: An Experimental Study
Julian Nyarko, Sharad Goel, Roseanna Sommers
Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO 2021)
Commentary in the Boston Globe
Racial Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition
Allison Koenecke, Andrew Nam, Emily Lake, Joe Nudell, Minnie Quartey, Zion Mengesha, Connor Toups, John Rickford, Dan Jurafsky, Sharad Goel
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 117, 2020
Listen to audio samples - Data & Code
Fair Allocation through Selective Information Acquisition
William Cai, Johann Gaebler, Nikhil Garg, Sharad Goel
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2020)
Fast Threshold Tests for Detecting Discrimination
Emma Pierson, Sam Corbett-Davies, Sharad Goel
The 21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2018)
Awarded Best Paper at AISTATS 2018
Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness
Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, and Aziz Huq
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2017)
The Problem of Infra-marginality in Outcome Tests for Discrimination
Camelia Simoiu, Sam Corbett-Davies, and Sharad Goel
Annals of Applied Statistics, Vol. 11, 2017
Data - code
Algorithmic Decision Making in the Presence of Unmeasured Confounding
Jongbin Jung, Ravi Shroff, Avi Feller, and Sharad Goel
Criminal Justice
Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing
Alex Chohlas-Wood, Marissa Gerchick, Sharad Goel, Aziz Huq, Amy Shoemaker, Ravi Shroff, Keniel Yao
University of Chicago Law Review (Forthcoming)
Empirical Approaches to Identify Systemic Discrimination in Policing
Alex Chohlas-Wood, Marissa Gerchick, Sharad Goel, Aziz Huq, Amy Shoemaker, Ravi Shroff, Keniel Yao, Sharad Goel
Inequality Reader (Forthcoming)
The Accuracy, Equity, and Jurisprudence of Criminal Risk Assessment
Sharad Goel, Ravi Shroff, Jennifer Skeem, Christopher Slobogin
Research Handbook on Big Data Law, 2021
Blind Justice: Algorithmically Masking Race in Charging Decisions
Alex Chohlas-Wood, Joe Nudell, Keniel Yao, Zhiyuan (Jerry) Lin, Julian Nyarko, Sharad Goel
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2021)
A Large-scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops Across the United States
Emma Pierson, Camelia Simoiu, Jan Overgoor, Sam Corbett-Davies, Daniel Jenson, Amy Shoemaker, Vignesh Ramachandran, Phoebe Barghouty, Cheryl Phillips, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel
Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 4, 2020
Stanford Open Policing Project - Supporting Information - Commentary in Slate
The Limits of Human Predictions of Recidivism
Zhiyuan (Jerry) Lin, Jongbin Jung, Sharad Goel, Jennifer Skeem
Science Advances, Vol. 6, 2020
Commentary in The Washington Post - Data & Code
Guiding Prosecutorial Decisions with an Interpretable Statistical Model
Zhiyuan (Jerry) Lin, Alex Chohlas-Wood, Sharad Goel
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2019)
An Analysis of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s Traffic Stop Practices
Alex Chohlas-Wood, Sharad Goel, Amy Shoemaker, and Ravi Shroff
Improving the California Bail Reform Act
Marissa Gerchick, Sam Corbett-Davies, Elan Dagenais, and Sharad Goel
Designing Equitable Algorithms for Criminal Justice Reform
Sam Corbett-Davies and Sharad Goel
Police Data Suggests Black and Hispanic Drivers Are Searched More Often Than Whites
Sharad Goel and Cheryl Phillips
Slate
Even Imperfect Algorithms Can Improve the Criminal Justice System
Sam Corbett-Davies, Sharad Goel, and Sandra González-Bailón
The New York Times
A computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions was labeled biased against blacks. It’s actually not that clear.
Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, and Sharad Goel
The Washington Post
Combatting Police Discrimination in the Age of Big Data
Sharad Goel, Maya Perelman, Ravi Shroff, and David Sklansky
New Criminal Law Review, Vol. 20, 2017
Stop-And-Frisk Did Not Work “Incredibly Well”
Sharad Goel and David Sklansky
The Huffington Post
Personalized Risk Assessments in the Criminal Justice System
Sharad Goel, Justin Rao, and Ravi Shroff
The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 106, 2016
Precinct or Prejudice? Understanding Racial Disparities in New York City's Stop-and-Frisk Policy
Sharad Goel, Justin Rao, and Ravi Shroff
Annals of Applied Statistics, Vol. 10, 2016
Processed stop-and-frisk data as an RData file; original NYPD data
Voting Rights
Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling Place Assignment on Voting
Sabina Tomkins, Keniel Yao, Johann Gaebler, Tobias Konitzer, David Rothschild, Marc Meredith, Sharad Goel
One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Sharad Goel, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr
American Political Science Review, Vol. 114, 2020
Commentary in Slate - Interview on This American Life
Chasing Electoral Ghosts
Sharad Goel, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr
Slate
Things I Mean to Know
Sharad Goel
This American Life
Political Polarization
Echo Chambers and Partisan Polarization: Evidence from the 2016 Presidential Campaign
Erik Peterson, Sharad Goel, and Shanto Iyengar
Political Science Research and Methods, 2020
Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption
Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin Rao
Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 80, 2016
Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis
Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, and Justin Rao
Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 80, 2016
Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating
Ashton Anderson, Sharad Goel, Gregory Huber, Neil Malhotra, and Duncan J. Watts
Sociological Science, Vol. 1, 2014
Real and Perceived Attitude Agreement in Social Networks
Sharad Goel, Winter Mason, and Duncan Watts
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 99, No. 4, 2010, 611-621
Election Polling
Disentangling Bias and Variance in Election Polls
Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, David Rothschild, Sharad Goel, and Andrew Gelman
Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 113, 2018
Commentary in The New York Times
High-Frequency Polling with Non-Representative Data
Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, David Rothschild, and Wei Wang
Routledge Studies in Global Information, Politics and Society (book chapter), 2016
The Mythical Swing Voter
Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, Doug Rivers, and David Rothschild
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 11, 2016
Forecasting Elections with Non-Representative Polls
Wei Wang, David Rothschild, Sharad Goel, and Andrew Gelman
International Journal of Forecasting, Vol 31, 2015
Online, Opt-in Surveys: Fast and Cheap, but are they Accurate?
Sharad Goel, Adam Obeng, and David Rothschild
Decision-Making
Probability Paths and the Structure of Predictions over Time
Zhiyuan (Jerry) Lin, Hao Sheng, Sharad Goel
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)
Supplementary Information
Simple Rules to Guide Expert Classifications
Jongbin Jung, Connor Concannon, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel, Daniel G. Goldstein
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, Vol. 183, 2020
Commentary in Harvard Business Review
Creating Simple Rules for Complex Decisions
Jongbin Jung, Connor Concannon, Ravi Shroff, Sharad Goel, and Daniel G. Goldstein
Harvard Business Review
Bayesian Sensitivity Analysis for Offline Policy Evaluation
Jongbin Jung, Ravi Shroff, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2020)
Privacy & Security
Surveilling Surveillance: Estimating the Prevalence of Surveillance Cameras with Street View Data
Hao Sheng, Keniel Yao, Sharad Goel
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2021)
View camera locations - Data & Code
“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer. I ignored it”: A study of ransomware
Camelia Simoiu, Christopher Gates, Joseph Bonneau, Sharad Goel
Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2019)
De-Anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks
Ansh Shukla, Jessica Su, Sharad Goel, and Arvind Narayanan
Proceedings of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2017)
Understanding Emerging Threats to Online Advertising
Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin Rao, Georgios Zervas
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Economics & Computation (EC 2016)
Why You Shouldn’t Be Comforted by Internet Providers’ Promises to Protect Your Privacy
Sharad Goel and Arvind Narayanan
Slate
Education
Bandit Algorithms to Personalize Educational Chatbots
William Cai, Joshua Grossman, Zhiyuan (Jerry) Lin, Hao Sheng, Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Joseph Jay Williams, Sharad Goel
Machine Learning, 2021
What Statistics Can't Tell Us in the Fight over Affirmative Action at Harvard
Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, and Daniel E. Ho
Boston Review
Creating Crowdsourced Research Talks at Scale
Rajan Vaish, Shirish Goyal, Amin Saberi, and Sharad Goel
Proceedings of the 27th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2018)
Video clip - Stanford Scholar
Crowd Research: Open and Scalable University Laboratories
Rajan Vaish, Snehalkumar (Neil) S. Gaikwad, Geza Kovacs, Andreas Veit, Ranjay Krishna, Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Camelia Simoiu, Michael Wilber, Serge Belongie, Sharad Goel, James Davis, and Michael S. Bernstein
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2017)
An Invisible Minority: Asian-Americans in Mathematics
Sharad Goel
Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 53, No. 8, 2006, 878-882
Public Health
Respondent Driven Sampling—Where We Are and Where Should We be Going?
Richard White, Amy Lansky, Sharad Goel, David Wilson, Wolfgang Hladik, Avi Hakim, and Simon DW Frost
Sexually Transmitted Infections, Vol. 88, No. 6, 2012, 397-399
Assessing Respondent-Driven Sampling
Sharad Goel and Matthew Salganik
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107, No. 15, 2010, 6743-6747
Respondent-Driven Sampling as Markov Chain Monte Carlo
Sharad Goel and Matthew Salganik
Statistics in Medicine, Vol. 28, No. 17, 2009, 2202-2229
Social Networks
An Experimental Study of Structural Diversity in Social Networks
Jessica Su, Krishna Kamath, Aneesh Sharma, Johan Ugander, Sharad Goel
The 14th International Conference On Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2020)
Awarded Best Paper at ICWSM 2020
Studying the “Wisdom of Crowds” at Scale
Camelia Simoiu, Chiraag Sumanth, Alok Mysore, Sharad Goel
The 7th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2019)
Awarded Best Paper at HCOMP 2019
The Effect of Recommendations on Network Structure
Jessica Su, Aneesh Sharma, Sharad Goel
Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016)
Information Diffusion
The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion
Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts
Management Science, Vol. 62, 2016
The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks
Sharad Goel, Duncan J. Watts, and Daniel G. Goldstein
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Economics & Computation (EC 2012)
Social Search in “Small-World” Experiments
Sharad Goel, Roby Muhamad, and Duncan Watts
Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009)