Aylin Caliskan

Timeline

1. 2009–2015

   Robotics and computer science

   She grows up in Istanbul and earns a BS from Binghamton University and Istanbul Technical University in 2009. At the University of Pennsylvania, she completes a robotics master's degree in 2011. She earns an MS in computer science in 2013 and a PhD in 2015 at Drexel University's College of Computing & Informatics, working with Rachel Greenstadt in its Privacy, Security, and Automation Laboratory.

2. 2015

   Identifying programmers through code

   In 2015, she coauthors “De-anonymizing Programmers via Code Stylometry” at the USENIX Security Symposium. The team uses machine learning to identify authors of C/C++ source code from their coding styles, showing a privacy risk for anonymous contributors.

3. 2015–2018

   A fellowship at Princeton

   From 2015 to 2018, she works as a postdoctoral researcher and fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, advised by Arvind Narayanan.

4. 2017

   The Word Embedding Association Test

   In 2017, she coauthors the Science paper “Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases” with Joanna J. Bryson and Arvind Narayanan. The work shows that models trained on ordinary language reproduce human biases and introduces the Word Embedding Association Test and Word Embedding Factual Association Test to measure associations in word representations.

5. By 2020

   Assistant professor at George Washington

   By 2020, she is an assistant professor of computer science at George Washington University. Her research covers bias in artificial intelligence, fairness in machine learning and privacy.

6. 2021

   Joining Washington's Information School

   In 2021, she joins the University of Washington's Information School as an assistant professor specializing in AI ethics. She also joins its Responsible AI Systems & Experiences team, which studies how intelligent information systems interact with society.

7. 2024

   Lab leadership and CAREER award

   She becomes a co-director of the UW Tech Policy Lab in January 2024. In 2024, she receives a $603,342 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for “The Impact of Associations and Biases in Generative AI on Society,” a project to measure biases in generative AI and their effects on people.

8. 2024

   Bias in AI resume screening

   In 2024, she is senior author of a study with Kyra Wilson on racial, gender and intersectional bias in AI resume screening. Across more than 550 resumes, the team varies names associated with white and Black men and women and finds bias in rankings from three language models.

9. 2025

   People follow AI hiring biases

   In 2025, she is senior author of a study in which 528 people screen candidates for 16 jobs using simulated language-model recommendations. The experiment finds that participants follow the AI's racial preferences when its recommendations show moderate bias.

10. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at Washington

    As of October 2026, she is an associate professor in the University of Washington's Information School and co-directs its Tech Policy Lab. She is also a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation. Her research focuses on AI ethics and safety in natural language processing, multimodal machine learning and human-AI collaboration.