Alex Hanna

Alex Hanna is a a computational social scientist working on machine learning curriculum at Google Cloud. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. Alex received her PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation was the Machine-learning Protest Event Data System (MPEDS), a system which uses machine learning and natural language processing to create protest event data.

Her research has focused on how new and social media has changed social movement mobilization and political participation. She relies on large-scale data collections and computational tools in her research, with an emphasis on automated textual analysis and machine learning. More recently, she has been interested in issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency in sociotechnical systems.