Professor Eliassi-Rad develops machine learning and data mining algorithms for complex networks representing physical and social phenomena. Her work has been applied to personalized search on the World Wide Web, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, cyber situational awareness, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, and ethics in machine learning.

Recently she has investigated the use of machine learning to make decisions in life-altering situations such as policing, pretrial deposition, hiring, loan approvals, and medical care. In most of these situations, machine learning algorithms are effectively treated as expert witnesses that are never cross-examined. This is alarming, she has shown, given that machine learning algorithms exploit the biases in the data fed to them.

Eliassi-Rad is a core member of Northeastern’s Network Science Institute. She earned her doctorate in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.