Kate Donahue

I'm a METEOR postdoc at MIT, working with Manish Raghavan. I'm a member of the AI for Society working group. Starting in summer 2026, I will be an assistant professor of computer science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I work on algorithmic problems relating to the societal impact of AI such as fairness, human/AI collaboration and game-theoretic models of federated/collaborative learning.

I did my PhD in computer Science at Cornell, where I was extremely fortunate to be advised by Jon Kleinberg. During my PhD, I interned at Google (with Kostas Kollias and Sreenivas Gollapudi), at Amazon (with Krishnaram Kenthapadi and Alexandra Chouldechova) and at Microsoft Research (with Solon Barocas, in the NYC FATE group, and with Nicole Immorlica and Brendan Lucier in the NE EconCS group). I have been selected as a "Rising Star in EECS" and my PhD research has been supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

My CV is available here. My pronouns are she/her/hers.

The best email is kpd@illinois.edu or kpd46@cornell.edu.

Recent news:

Summer 2025: I'm co-organizing these wonderful workshops: Workshop on Human Algorithm Collaboration (EC), 2nd Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models (ICML), and Incentives for Collaborative Learning and Data Sharing (TTIC, August 13-15). Please come by!
My dissertation won Cornell CS's PhD dissertation award!
Spring 2025: I'm giving a talk at Simons (2/6), presenting our "Private Blotto" paper at AAAI '25, giving a talk AWS in the Themis Science series (3/10), Meta AI & Society seminar (3/20), BEACH workshop on Behavioral Models in EconCS (4/4), and at the Harvard EconCS seminar (4/18).
I'm co-organizing the new AI for Society seminar at MIT.
Fall 2024: I'll be giving invited talks at the CMU FEAT reading group (9/25), CMU workshop on Human-AI Teaming (9/26), INFORMS (10/20), UMass Amherst Theory Seminar (10/24), Boston College department seminar (11/1). I'm visiting Simons this fall for the semesters on Generalization and LLMs (the weeks of 9/24 and 10/14).
September 2024: I've moved to Boston! Come say hi if you're in the area.
Summer 2024 travel: I'll be at: FORC (presenting our "When are two lists better than one?" paper), WALE (co-organizing the Trustworthy AI day), MPI-Tübingen (giving a talk in Moritz Hardt's group meeting), EC (co-organizing the Gender Inclusion workshop), ICML (co-presenting our "Impact of Decentralized Learning on Player Utilities in Stackelberg Games" work and co-organizing a Data and Learning Economics social), (virtually) giving a talk the workshop on Tech for Good!, ESIF (co-presenting the "Decentralized Stackelberg" paper), and EEA-ESESM (presenting the "When are two lists better than one?" paper).
New paper accepted at the prestigious SIGBOVIK conference, with joint authors Katy, Katie, Kate, Katherine, Katie, Cathy, & Katie!

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