Location: D.M. Smith room 303
The School of Public Policy welcomes Dr. Fay Cobb Payton as a speaker for our SPP Seminar Series for a talk titled, "Coding, Coded & Counting: A Bias Continuum".
This presentation will review Dr. Payton's research trajectory starting from earlier publications to works in progress. Payton's earlier research examined information sharing and the impacts on health organizations and patients given the increased needs to share clinical information. She has continued this research with the expansion into social media, human-computer interaction, content design as well as health disparities via comorbid conditions (including breast cancer, mental health, HIV), and data modeling. A central theme of Payton's research is leveraging, creating, and using data to assess society (community) needs and the intersection of disparities that exist along an “implications” continuum. While much of the data created and used is a direct result of embedded notions of “systems” informing a direct outcome, the coding, coded and counting (Web of Cs) does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, the coding and coded influence a counting of decisions used that impact lived experiences. For Black and Brown communities, this web of Cs informed algorithmic bias while overlooking factors including context, place, and space. These issues hold implications for data governance, curation, and algorithmic ethics.
About the Speaker
Fay Cobb Payton is a professor emeritus and was a full professor (with Tenure) of Information Technology/Analytics at North Carolina State University. She is a named University Faculty Scholar for her leadership in turning research into solutions to society’s most pressing issues.
She is a workshop facilitator, speaker, and consultant. She recently completed a rotation as a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Computer, Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. At NSF, she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program and worked on several initiatives, such as INCLUDES, ADVANCE, Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability & Transparency Dear Colleague Letter; Research Expansion and Cloud Computing Dear Colleague Letter with partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft; HBCU Excellence in Research; and NSF Research Traineeship (NRT). She received the NSF Director’s Award in 2020. She is the co-chair DEI Committee for the Association for Computing Machinery Education Board and a member of the ACM Diversity Council. She was an American Council on Education Fellow and worked with higher education leaders from the United States and Ghana on strategic collaborations and public-private partners and now serves on the ACE Council of Fellows. She is a member of the National Academics of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Advancing Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Organizations. She led to the NSF funding and support of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Consensus Study on Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women of Color in Tech.
Payton’s research interests include AI fairness/bias, UX design and impacts on lived experiences; healthcare disparities; data science, social media use among underserved groups; racial, gender and ethnic identities in online communities; tech inclusion, innovation & entrepreneurship. She is the founding director of @myhealthimpact, a social network experience that focuses on health disparities and social media technology interventions.
She has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference publications, and book chapters. Her research has been published and/or is forthcoming in the Journal of STEM Education Research and Innovation, Communications of the ACM, INROADS, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Technology & People, IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, Information Systems Journal, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Health Care Management Science, Telemedicine and eHealth, just to name a few. She is often the speaker, consultant, and/or panelist for corporate career development and leadership programs in corporate and academic initiatives. She has appeared in or cited by Essence Magazine, IEEE Spectrum, Insider Higher Ed, CBS Radio Network, Sunrise America, Financial Review, and others to discuss tech inclusion. Payton has provided executive coaching, assessment, and leadership development in midcareer IT roles via in-class, virtual settings, and workshops. She has engaged in rotational and summer assignments in corporate settings, including SAS, IBM, IQVIA, National Institutes of Health where she worked with company leaders on strategic planning and execution.
She earned a Ph.D. in Information & Decision Systems (with a specialty in Health Care Systems) from Case Western Reserve University. Prior to joining academe, she worked in corporate IT and consulting at IBM, Ernst & Young/Cap Gemini, and Time, Inc. She earned a B.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.A .in Accounting (with a minor in mathematics) from Clark Atlanta University. She also has an MBA (Decision Sciences) from Clark Atlanta University. She is the author of Leveraging Intersectionality: Seeing and Not Seeing (Richer Press), an anthology of her research on STEM education and experiences in both academe and corporate environments. She serves on several advisory boards and as the chair of the executive advisory committee for the Interfaith Food Shuttle.
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