Safiya Umoja Noble
Associate Professor, Information Studies & African American Studies
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
Safiya Umoja Noble is an associate professor at UCLA in the Department of Information Studies and African American Studies. She is a partner in Stratelligence, a firm that specializes in research on information and data science challenges, and is a co-founder of the Information Ethics & Equity Institute, which provides training for organizations committed to transforming their information management practices toward more just, and equitable outcomes. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award.
Noble’s academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology design. Her monograph on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines is entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of two books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online (Peter Lang, Digital Formations, 2016), and Emotions, Technology & Design (Elsevier, 2015). Safiya holds a PhD and MS in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in Sociology from California State University, Fresno with an emphasis on African American/Ethnic Studies.
Her research and scholarly interests include:
Racial and gender bias in algorithms
Technological redlining
Artificial intelligence and human rights
Socio-cultural, economic and ethical implications of information in society
Digital technology and Internet policy development
Privacy and racial surveillance
Critical information studies
Award
Sep 2020 • Received ISAA Distinguished Alumna Award
Aug 2020 • The UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry received $2.9M from Australia-based Minderoo Foundation to study intersection of technology, power and society
Selected Publication
Media Appearance
