Suresh Venkatasubramanian is an Indian computer scientist and professor at Brown University. In 2021, he was appointed to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he provided advice on issues related to fairness and bias in technology systems. Before joining Brown University, he worked as a professor at the University of Utah. He is recognized for his work in computational geometry, which involves studying shapes and spaces using computers, and in differential privacy, a method for keeping data safe while sharing information. His research has been reported by media outlets such as Science Friday, NBC News, and Gizmodo. He also manages the Geomblog, a blog that has been featured in the New York Times, Hacker News, KDnuggets, and other publications. He has held positions as an associate editor for the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications and as an academic editor for PeerJ Computer Science. Additionally, he has participated in program committees for conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, the SIAM Conference on Data Mining, NIPS, SIGKDD, SODA, and STACS.

Career

Suresh Venkatasubramanian earned his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his PhD at Stanford University in 1999, with guidance from Rajeev Motwani and Jean-Claude Latombe. After finishing his PhD, he worked at AT&T Labs and taught as a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he taught classes on computational geometry and streaming algorithms. In 2007, he joined the University of Utah School of Computing as the John E. and Marva M. Warnock Presidential Endowed Chair for Faculty Innovation in Computer Science. In 2010, he received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. From 2013 to 2014, he worked as a visiting scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley and at Google. In 2021, Prof. Venkatasubramanian was appointed to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he advised on fairness and bias in technology systems. At the same time, he joined Brown University’s Computer Science department and their Data Science Initiative. At Brown, Prof. Venkatasubramanian will begin a new center called Computing for the People. This center will focus on creating computer science that meets people’s needs, rather than hiding behind neutrality that only helps those already in power.