Photo: Gretchen Ertl / MIT News

I am an anthropologist who writes about computing and artificial intelligence. My research examines unorthodox models of computational rationality, such as nonclassical logics from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, and frameworks of information science from Cuba. My teaching specialties include contemporary social and anthropological theory, the history and anthropology of science and technology, and the social dimensions of digital technologies. I received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from MIT.

Publications

Automated Mathematics and the Reconfiguration of Proof and Labor, forthcoming in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

This article develops the analysis I first presented at the 2022 Fields Medal Symposium (in honor of Akshay Venkatesh).

Search Atlas: Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders (with Katherine Ye), Designing Interactive Systems Conference (2021).

Covered by press outlets in 15+ languages, for example English, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Japanese.

Informatics of the Oppressed, Logic no. 11 (2020), 53–74.

Winner of the 2020 Bob Williams Research Paper Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Portuguese translation: Informática do oprimido, DigiLabour (2021).

The Long History of Algorithmic Fairness, Phenomenal World (2020).

Portuguese translation: A longa história da justiça algorítmica, Revista Rosa (2022).

The Invention of “Ethical AI”: How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation, The Intercept (2019).

Reprinted in Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of “Ethics” in AI (Institute of Network Cultures, 2022).

Filtering Dissent: Social Media and Land Struggles in Brazil (with James Holston), New Left Review no. 99 (2016), 85–108.

Spanish translation: Filtrar la disidencia: Redes sociales y luchas por la tierra en Brasil.

Turkish translation (excerpt): Sosyal Medya Çağında Muhalefeti Ayıklamak, e-skop (2016).

PhD dissertation

“Remodeling Rationality: An Inquiry into Unorthodox Modes of Logic and Computation” (PhD diss., MIT, 2021). Book version in progress.

Committee: Stefan Helmreich (chair), Eden Medina, Sally Haslanger, Lucy Suchman.

Software

Search Atlas visualizes how Google search results differ across locations and languages. Joint work with Katherine Ye (Carnegie Mellon University).

Relata is an experimental tool for collaborative indexing and exploratory search of humanistic literature. The project is hosted at MIT and developed in cooperation with the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In 2021, it received a Making and Doing Award Commendation from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Teaching

At Leiden University, I teach the Digital Anthropology course for undergraduate students, co-teach the social and anthropological theory course for graduate students, and supervise theses.

I previously contributed to the design of MIT’s largest machine learning course. This work was featured in MIT News.

Contact

Email address: rodrigo@ochigame.org

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