Agoritsa Polyzou

Bio

Dr. Polyzou is an Assistant Professor at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), Miami. Agoritsa received her Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Minnesota. Next, she was a Postdoctoral Fritz Family Fellow with the Massive Data Institute of McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. She is involved in projects at the intersection of data mining, machine learning, ethics, and fairness. Her research interests include data mining, recommender systems, predictive models within educational contexts, and the fairness concerns that arise from their use. Educational institutions strive to offer better services to their students while maintaining a significant amount of data about students' characteristics, course selection, and performance. Dr. Polyzou's goal is to use this data, which is already collected and stored, and machine learning models to help students make informed decisions and succeed in their undergraduate studies. She has developed data-driven models for next-term performance prediction, student-at-risk identification, course recommendation, and team formation. At the same time, she is interested in ensuring that such models will be fair and responsible. This is translated in two ways in Dr. Polyzou's research; ensuring that the models do not discriminate against any particular subpopulation and building models that promote diversity.