Rhema Vaithianathan - The algorithm ace

Professor Rhema Vaithianathan is co-director of the Centre for Social Data Analytics at AUT. She is widely published in the research areas of health and development economics and applied microeconomics, has been a policy analyst for the New Zealand Treasury, and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard. Previously, Vaithianathan was an associate professor at the University of Auckland, where she led a team that developed a mathematical method of predicting child abuse. She has recently used that model as a basis for work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a predictive tool developed by her and her team assists call screeners to decide which calls about alleged child maltreatment should be investigated further. The modelling is now being used and assessed by states across the US. https://csda.aut.ac.nz/