Amit Datta

Amit received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2018. He was advised by Professor Anupam Datta. Prior to that, he received his Bachelor of Technology from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2012.

At a high level, Amit's research aims at improving privacy, fairness, and accountability in large-scale automated systems by drawing on techniques in experimentation, statistics, and machine learning. As part of his PhD research, he has developed methods to detect information flow in blackbox systems and applied them to find discrimination, opacity and choice on Google’s ad ecosystem. The information flow experiments framework (AdFisher) is open-sourced and freely available on Github. Details of the experiments and results are available here. He has also explored and evaluated privacy enhancing technologies and legal action as defenses against algorithmic discrimination. Here is a link to his disseration.

Amit is now a Privacy Engineer at Snap Inc. All further updates will be at amitdatta.com.