Weiyao Wang (Math) and Jennifer Du , along with NCCU Physics majors Jarrett Weathersby and Samuel Watson, spent ten weeks learning about how search engines often provide results which are not representative in terms of race and/or gender. Working closely with entrepreneur Winston Henderson, their goal was to understand how to frame this problem via statistical and machine-learning methodology, as well as to explore potential solutions.
Project Results
In order to understand Google’s algorithm, the team web-scraped search results and used machine-learning to understand the importance of each feature. They then performed sentiment analysis to quantify public opinions from Twitter and used community-based crawling and seeding to collect information relevant to minority groups.
Download the Executive Summary (PDF)
Faculty Sponsor
- Sayan Mukherjee, Professor, Statistical Science
Project Manager
- Michael Lindon, Ph.D candidate, Statistics
Participants
- Jennifer Du, Duke University Computer Science
- Weiyao Wang, Duke University Computer Science, Mathematics, and Political Science
- Jarrett Weathersby, North Carolina Central University Physics
- Samuel Watson, North Carolina Central University Physics
Disciplines Involved
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Economics
- All quantitative STEM
