Ari Smith Contact Academic Bio Research Interests Publications Teaching Resume Music Bio Recordings Upcoming Events Catalog of Scores

I am a Ph.D. student at UW-Madison (since Fall 2019) in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a doctoral minor in Science and Technology Studies, under the advising of professor Justin Boutilier. My academic interests include critical algorithm studies, sociotechnical infrastructures of algorithms and fairness in public policy and democratic theory, feminist philosophies of science and technology, and relations between preference, agency, and subject formation in systems of humans and optimization technologies.

Current projects are focused on:

• inverse optimization as a method of observing/framing congressional gerrymandering
• machine learning for predicting hospital emergency department crowding, and model transferability/drift across settings affected by covid-19
• feminist technoscience analyses of the infrastructures and deployments of preference elicitation algorithms.

In relation with these projects, I am currently an honorary appointee at UW Madison’s Department of Emergency Medicine, a data science intern at UW Health Enterprise Analytics, and a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.

Prior education:

• Oberlin College, B.A. in Math, minor in Computer Science, 2019
• Oberlin Conservatory, B.Mus. in Jazz Studies (Bass Performance), with secondary study in Classical Composition, 2019