Dr. Rachel Cummings is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. She is also an Affiliate in the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy) and a Co-chair of the Cybersecurity Research Center at the Data Science Institute. Before joining Columbia, she was an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests lie primarily in data privacy, with connections to machine learning, algorithmic economics, optimization, statistics, and public policy. Her work has focused on problems such as strategic aspects of data generation, incentivizing truthful reporting of data, privacy-preserving algorithm design, impacts of privacy policy, and human decision-making.
Dr. Cummings received her Ph.D. in Computing and Mathematical Sciences from the California Institute of Technology, her M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an Apple Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Award, a JP Morgan Chase Faculty Award, a Google Research Fellowship, a Mozilla Research Grant, the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention, the Amori Doctoral Prize in Computing and Mathematical Sciences, a Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer Science, and Best Paper Awards at SaTML (2023), CCS (2021) and DISC (2014). Dr. Cummings also serves on the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council’s Privacy Committee and the Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board.
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News
- Sept 21 – Our paper “An active learning framework for multi-group mean estimation” was accepted to NeurIPS
- June 13 – Our paper What Are the Chances? Explaining the Epsilon Parameter in Differential Privacy was accepted to USENIX Security
- May 11 – Congratulations to Roy Rinberg for successfully defending his M.S. thesis! In the fall he will start his Ph.D at Harvard
- May 9 – Our paper The Privacy Elasticity of Behavior: Conceptualization and Application was accepted to EC
- Apr 25 – I was awarded an Early Career Faculty Impact Fellowship for bridging privacy technologies and policymaking
- Feb 8 – Our paper Optimal Data Acquisition with Privacy-Aware Agents won the Best Paper Award at SaTML
- Jan 27 – I was selected as a Center for Democracy & Technology Fellow for 2023-2025
- Jan 20 – Our paper Differentially Private Synthetic Control was accepted to AISTATS
- Jan 1 – I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor