Alex Berke

I'm currently a PhD candidate at MIT, in the Media Lab's City Science group.
My thesis committee includes Kent Larson, Sandy Pentland, and Latanya Sweeney.

Before graduate school, I worked for years in industry, at the intersection of technology and social impact.

I am a computational researcher who repurposes commercial surveillance data to help empower the communities from whom data are collected. I do this by developing data crowdsourcing tools, analyzing privacy risks, designing privacy enhancing technology, and leveraging these data for computational social science. I focus on the digital traces we unavoidably generate, such as mobile phone location data, web browsing data, and purchase histories.

My work is interdisciplinary, spanning privacy and cryptography, behavioral economics, sustainability and transportation. I'm an engineer and I build the tools I use to do my research.