Assistant Professor Ashton Anderson has been awarded the 2021 Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Prize from CS-Can/Info-Can, Canada’s national academic organization for computer science.

The prize recognizes CS faculty members at Canadian universities within 10 years of their PhD who have made significant contributions early in their academic careers, particularly to research.

In addition to his appointment to the Department of Computer Science, Anderson is a Faculty Affiliate with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2015 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Microsoft Research NYC in 2017. His research in computational social science encompasses a diverse range of questions at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data and society. He has pioneered computational methods to quantify online phenomena including political polarization and has developed human-centered machine learning systems. His work has appeared in venues including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the International Conference on Machine Learning, and has been covered in Science, The Economist and Wired. He received a best paper runner-up award at WWW 2014, was invited to the 2016 TKDD Special Issue of Best Papers of KDD 2016 and won the 2012–2015 Google PhD Fellowship in Social Computing.