Camelia Simoiu, ASA
PhD Candidate

Computational Social Science
Stanford University

email: csimoiu [at] stanford [dot] edu

Curriculum Vitae





About

My research focuses on designing and evaluating algorithmic tools to aid human decision-making
in the areas of cyber security and criminal justice. I draw on methods from machine learning, statistics,
and online experiments. I am part of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, advised by Professor Sharad Goel.
Our work has been featured in the The Economist, The Daily Show, NBC News, and Vox.

Previously, I was a Fellow of the University of Chicago's Data Science for Social Good program, and a visiting
researcher at the MIT Media Lab in the Human Dynamics group. I received a B.S. in applied statistics from the
University of Toronto and a M.S. in artificial intelligence from the University of Amsterdam. In my spare time, you'll
find me exploring California's back roads on a road bike, waking up at 3am to climb mountains in the snow, diving,
and attempting to produce tolerable sounds on the cello.



Publications

Who is targeted by email-based phishing and malware? Measuring factors that differentiate risk
Camelia Simoiu, Ali Zand, Kurt Thomas, Elie Bursztein.
ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2020 (IMC), 2020 [Forthcoming]


"I was told to buy a software or lose my computer. I ignored it": A study of ransomware
Camelia Simoiu, Christopher Gates, Joseph Bonneau, Sharad Goel.
Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2019
slides

A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States
Emma Pierson, Camelia Simoiu, Jan Overgoor, Sam Corbett-Davies, Vignesh Ramachandran, Cheryl Phillips, Sharad Goel
Nature Human Behavior, Vol. 4, 2020
Stanford Open Policing project | data | code | press

The Problem of Infra-marginality in Outcome Tests for Discrimination
Camelia Simoiu, Sam Corbett-Davies, Sharad Goel
Annals of Applied Statistics, 2017
data | code | slides | TedX

Studying the "Wisdom of Crowds" at Scale
Camelia Simoiu, Chiraag Sumanth, Alok Mysore, Sharad Goel
Seventh AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), 2019
[Best Paper Award]
data | slides

Crowd Research: Open and Scalable University Laboratories.
with Rajan Vaish, Michael Bernstein, Geza Kovacs, et. al.
UIST 2017

Investigating the Wisdom of the Crowds at Scale
Alok Shankar Mysore, Camelia Simoiu, Sharad Goel, et al.
UIST 2015


Reports

Developing data science tools for improving enterprise cyber-security (Data Study Group Final Report)
Alan Turing Institute, 2018

Quantifying Systemic Cyber Risk, Report on the "Connectedness in Cyber Risk" Workshop
Global CRQ Network, 2018


Selected talks

09/2020 Core Data Science, Facebook, Menlo Park, CA.

09/2020 Guest speaker, Using Artificial Intelligence for Good (EECS98), Berkeley, CA.

03/2020 Women in Data Science (WiDS) panel, Stanford, CA.

03/2020 Norton LifeLock, Mountain View, CA.

10/2019 Cybersecurity & Privacy Festival (Defending the Human), Stanford, CA.

10/2019 Seventh AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), Stevenson, WA.

08/2019 Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Santa Clara, CA.

05/2019 WWW CyberSafety Workshop, San Francisco, CA.

05/2019 Google (Apps UX Research), Sunnyvale, CA

12/2018 Eleventh International Conference on Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics), Pisa, Italy.

12/2018 Stanford Computer Science Security Lunch, Stanford, CA.

05/2018 Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, CA.

04/2018 Santa Clara University, AI for social impact speaker series, Santa Clara, CA.

12/2017 StanCon2018, Pacific Grove, CA.

10/2017 Conference On Digital Experimentation (CODE), Boston, MA.

05/2017 World Economic Forum, Cyber Risk Quantification Workshop, San Diego, CA.

11/2016 TEDxBeaconStreet, Cambridge, MA.

08/2016 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), Chicago, IL.

07/2016 2nd Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (CSS), Evanston, IL.


Service

I have served on the program committee for the following conferences:

Co-organized the Behavioral security seminar, Stanford, CA, 2018


Press coverage

10/17 Stanford News. A Stanford-led platform for crowdsourced research gives experience to global participants
08/17 The Daily Show. A Stanford University study uncovers racial disparity in routine traffic stops
06/17 The Economist. Measuring racial bias in police forces
06/17 NBC News. Police searches drop dramatically in states that legalized marijuana
06/17 The Daily Mail. Police officers are more likely to cite black or Latino drivers than whites during traffic stops

08/16 Vox. Study: police officers have lower standards for searching black people than white people
08/16 Vox. Commentary in VOX
06/16 Stanford News. Stanford researchers develop new statistical test that shows racial profiling in police traffic stops
02/16 The Observer. Stanford Traffic Stops Database Will Let Public Analyze Racial Profiling
02/16 Phys.org Engineers battle bias in the criminal justice system
02/16 Stanford News. Stanford engineers' 'Law, Order & Algorithms' data project aims to identify bias in the criminal justice system

News
09/2020 Invited talk at Facebook's Core Data Science research group.
09/2020 Excited to share my "path" into tech and to speak about using AI for good, as part of Berkeley's student-led DeCal course on Opportunities and Barriers: Identifying Pathways into Tech
05/2019 Excited to be joining Google this summer for a research internship.
12/2018 Excited to be participaing in the Data Science Study Group, Alan Turing Institute, London, UK
07/2017 Excited to be joining Symantec this summer for a research internship.
07/2017 Our paper on crowd research won a Best paper honorable mention award at UIST.
07/2017 Leading a data science workshop at IRE 2017 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference
05/2017 Invited to attend the GREPSEC III Workshop on computer security research.
11/2016 New blog post on Bayesian statistics: A bag of tips and tricks for dealing with scale issues with Jim Savage
09/2016 Our paper "A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States" accepted for presentation at the Computation + Journalism 2016 Conference at Stanford
09/2016 Awarded ACCEL Fellowship, courtesy of the MS&E Department, Stanford
08/2016 Our paper "Testing for Racial Discrimination in Police Searches of Motor Vehicles" voted most interesting papers on arXiv (week 08/06)
03/2016 Awarded ACCEL Fellowship, courtesy of the MS&E Department, Stanford
02/2016 Selected as one of RSA Scholars. Thank you RSA!
06/2015 Winner of the Knight News Challenge on our project Law, Order & Algorithms. With Sharad Goel, Sam Corbett-Davies, and Vignesh Ramachandran
11/2015 Invited poster with oral presentation at ACM UIST 2015 on collective intelligence
02/2015 Excited to lead the data science team of the Aspiring Researcher Challenge along with Sharad Goel, Rajan Vaish, and Imanol Arrieta Ibarra