Yahav Bechavod

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advised by Katrina Ligett.

My research is generously supported by an Apple PhD Fellowship in AI/ML.

Updates:

[Jul-02-2020]	Our new paper "Metric-Free Individual Fairness in Online Learning" will be featured at the Participatory Approaches to Machine Learning and Human in the Loop Learning workshops at ICML 2020.
[Jun-30-2020]	Check out our new paper "Causal Feature Discovery through Strategic Modification" featured at the Incentives in Machine Learning workshop at ICML 2020!
[Sep-03-2019]	Paper accepted to NeurIPS 2019!
[Aug-01-2019]	I will be visiting Microsoft Research New England August 5-9, 2019.
[Jul-06-2019]	I will be presenting our new paper "Equal Opportunity in Online Classification with Partial Feedback" as part of the Recent Developments in Research on Fairness workshop at Simons Institute. Slides are available here.
[May-10-2019]	Excited to take part in the Summer Cluster: Algorithmic Fairness program at Simons Institute.

My research explores foundational questions in the field of algorithmic fairness, such as:
(1) Characterizing the amount of friction between utility and fairness in various settings.
(2) Providing novel algorithms guaranteeing high utility and fairness in the face of limited or partial feedback.
(3) Making clever use of human feedback in the learning loop in auditing for unfairness.

I have also worked on and have ongoing interest in settings where machine learning algorithms interact with adaptive, strategic behavior.

In 2019, I had the privilege of spending an amazing summer at Berkeley, California, visiting the Simons Institute as a participant in the Summer Cluster: Algorithmic Fairness program.

In the Fall of 2017, I was fortunate to visit the University of Pennsylvania at the invitation of Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns.

I received both my MSc (Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude) and BSc (Computer Science and Mathematics) from the Hebrew University.

In my spare time, I shoot select 3-pointers on select basketball courts, speak fluent Arabic and not-so-fluent Japanese, blog about CS and non-CS stuff, and travel to cool places on pandemic-less times.