Chelsea Barabas is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, where she examines the spread of algorithmic decision-making tools in the US criminal legal system. She works with a group of interdisciplinary researchers, government officials, and community organizers to unpack and transform mainstream narratives around criminal justice reform and data-driven decision making.
She is currently a Technology Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Formerly, Chelsea was a research scientist for the AI Ethics and Governance Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
Chelsea also completed her Master’s degree at MIT, where she got the chance to work alongside a group of professors, researchers, and students in the Comparative Media Studies Program and at the Center for Civic Media in the Media Lab. With this community, she explored a wide range of issues related to the use of emerging technologies to serve the public good. Common across all her work is a general interest in building and critically examining technologies that aim to serve the public interest.
The main focus of Chelsea’s Master’s research was on understanding the U.S.'s ongoing struggle to cultivate and hire a diverse technical workforce. For her thesis, she worked with CODE2040 to take a close look at the overlooked biases and limitations inherent in the tech industry's current recruitment practices.