About

Zee Fryer (they/them)

I did my PhD in math at the University of Manchester in the north of England, followed by a research postdoc at the University of Leeds and a three year stint as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara.

After leaving academia I was lucky enough to land a place in Google’s AI Residency, which in theory was hosted in Mountain View but in practice (thanks COVID) the entire 18 month residency was remote. I spent half my time working with the Discrete Algorithms team and half working with Responsible AI.

I then spent 18 months working at the New York based statup Reality Defender, which is developing an industry-leading suite of tools for detecting GenAI deepfakes. As the first data hire at the company I developed and built the initial data infrastructure and established standards for the use of high quality and ethically sourced data, and in my role as team lead I handled hiring, managing, and mentoring what eventually became a six-person superstar team.

I’m now looking for AI research / machine learning / data science / adjacent jobs in the Bay Area, ideally with a focus on at least one of the following:

• Long-term AI fairness work: Figuring out how to train fairer models and developing strategies and tools to enable other ML practitioners to do the same.
• Short-term AI fairness work: Identifying and mitigating biases in current models, and implementing harm reduction measures to protect people from marginalized groups while we work on the longer-term issues.
• Data for ML: how can we quantify how “good” a dataset is, ensure better demographic balance in our datasets, and/or identify gaps in dataset coverage even when we don’t really have a clear idea of exactly what “coverage” should mean?
• Model evaluation: Coming up with better ways to rigorously test models, figure out what they’re doing, and (crucially) what features of the inputs are being used in order to produce the outputs.

This is a non-exhaustive list: I love working on new problems and I’m interested in pretty much anything that’ll give me the opportunity to keep learning!