Cathy O’Neil

Affiliation: CEO, ORCAA

Cathy O’Neil grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. As a girl, she was seriously interested in both music and math. The summer she turned 15, she had to decide between piano camp and math camp at Hampshire College. She went with math camp, learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube with group theory, and never looked back—although she still plays fiddle in various jams at least once a week.

After becoming a math professor at Barnard College, O’Neil entered finance in 2007, right before the credit crisis, first working at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and then the risk firm Riskmetrics. She became more and more alarmed by what she saw as the misuse of mathematics as an intimidating cover used to exploit less sophisticated investors and, eventually, the public.

She quit finance and became a data scientist in the New York AdTech scene in 2011, joined Occupy Wall Street, and soon became alarmed at what she found in the world of data science, which—as she saw it—was a way to make lucky people luckier and unlucky people unluckier by propagating the past into the future. The result was the book Weapons of Math Destruction, published in the fall of 2016, and the formation of her algorithmic auditing company, ORCAA, also in 2016.

The mission of ORCAA is to develop standards around algorithmic accountability in general and algorithmic fairness toward individuals in protected classes specifically. The current obstacle: Fairness isn’t well defined legally, so rules around fairness are mostly being ignored or arbitrarily applied. Toward that goal, O’Neil is proud of the work ORCAA is doing with, among others, the Colorado Division of Insurance and the Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking of Washington DC to develop rules around the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in insurance.