Safiya Noble honored for her work at the ‘intersection of technology and equality’

Safiya Noble, professor in the department of gender studies in the UCLA Division of Social Sciences, who also holds appointments in the departments of African American studies and information studies, was celebrated in an installation ceremony on Oct. 23 as the holder of the prestigious David O. Sears Presidential Chair in Social Sciences. While the installation ceremony took place this year, Noble is in year three of a five-year term of the chair.

The chair, named for the former distinguished professor of psychology and political science, former dean of social sciences and former director of the Institute for Social Science Research, was created to support the careers of faculty members in the UCLA College, recognizing excellence and solution-oriented research. 

“It’s an incredible honor to hold a chair named after Professor Sears, who is one of the foremost and legendary political scientists of our time,” Noble said. “When my students and family ask me what this means, I tell them it is one of the ways a university acknowledges the contributions of its faculty to UCLA and to the social sciences. It is the conferral of a prestigious recognition that my work matters in the world. I am deeply appreciative of this support, which accelerates our shared work of building a field of critical research and researchers at the intersection of society, data and AI.”

Noble’s research is focused on the internet’s impact on society, and the ways that it intersects with issues such as race, gender and power. Her 2018 best-selling book, “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” synthesized these interests, uncovering the dangers posed by online search engines, one of the earliest books to carefully outline the dangers of artificial intelligence and algorithmic prediction on society.

“She’s the first person I think about when I imagine a liberatory internet,” said Elizabeth Marchant, chair of gender studies at UCLA, at the downtown Los Angeles event. “That points to how difficult it is to capture the breadth of her contributions. As a feminist, what draws me to Safiya’s work — what I see at its core — is the light she sheds on our understanding of social relations, especially on the power relations embedded in technologies — gender studies is all about power relations!”

Noble is the director of the Center on Race and Digital Justice at UCLA and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech and Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She also serves as the interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative.

Noble regularly serves on federal, state and municipal advisory councils dedicated to mitigating the negative impacts and biases of AI and is regarded as one of the foremost experts on algorithmic and online discrimination and bias in the technology industry. Her work helped inform the White House “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” in 2022, and an executive order on the “safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence,” for which she was invited by President Joe Biden to witness its historic adoption in October 2023. Her research and commentary have been featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, CNN, Slate, Bloomberg and BBC, among other outlets.

Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which fights online abuses, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment, supported by the Nobel Commission. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.

“Professor Noble’s mission, as a scholar at the intersection of technology and equality, is to remind us of our greatness and strength as people, rather than have us become diminished into data points,” Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt said. “And the MacArthur Foundation, the NAACP, the Archewell Foundation — and all of us here — can see that she is fulfilling that mission well.”

“I hope to continue to build a long-term and impactful body of work in the tradition of Professor David O. Sears, who has made lasting contributions to our understanding of complex questions around racial bias, power and politics,” Noble said. “As my work is concerned with similar issues, my goal is to shed light on the threats to democracy we face by the tech industry and its harmful consumer products. The endowed chair helps bring legitimacy and resources to help me do this crucial and timely work on digital civil and human rights.”