Rediet Abebe (Amharic: ረድኤት አበበ; born 1991 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian computer scientist who works in the fields of algorithms and artificial intelligence. She is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS). While most editions note that she was previously a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Albanian edition describes her as currently holding this fellowship.^{[10,24,26,45,12,25,90]} She completed her academic studies across Cornell University (Ph.D., M.S.), Harvard University (M.S., B.A.), and the University of Cambridge (M.A.), having completed her 2019 doctoral dissertation titled "Designing Algorithms for Social Good" under advisor Jon M. Kleinberg.

Abebe's research develops mathematical and computational frameworks, models, and techniques to analyze, examine, and mitigate questions related to socio-economic inequality, fairness in resource distribution, and distributive justice.^{[2,11,46,10,23,24,91]} An advocate for diversity and inclusion in computing, she co-founded the multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research initiatives Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), which works to improve opportunities for historically disadvantaged communities, as well as the Black in AI organization and researcher network.^{[12,47,48,11,65,27,92]} In 2019, she was named among the MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" and became a Harvard Society of Fellows member, and was later honored as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022.^[1,3]

Abebe was born in 1991 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she grew up in a low-income family.^{[14,15,49,51,4]} She initially attended Nazareth School, studying under the Ethiopian National Curriculum, before winning a competitive merit-based scholarship—awarded to four students in the country—to attend the International Community School of Addis Ababa for secondary school starting in eighth grade.^{[4,14,50,20,59,51,16,44,93]} She then attended Harvard University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 2013 and a Master of Science in applied mathematics in 2015 from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, conducting research with David C. Parkes.^[44] As an undergraduate, she co-authored research papers in mathematics, physics, and public health.^{[16,17,44,19,18,51,94]} While at Harvard, she also served as a staff writer and editor for The Harvard Crimson between 2009 and 2011, focusing her articles on the Cambridge public school system and local educational institutions.^[5,18,17,95]

After college, she continued her studies during the 2013–2014 academic year at the University of Cambridge as a Harvard-Cambridge Scholar and Governor William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College.^{[19,52,21,20]} There, she completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos—a master's-level course regarded as among the most intensive in the world—and earned a Master of Advanced Study in pure mathematics under the supervision of Imre Leader.

In 2015, Abebe began her doctoral studies in computer science at Cornell University as a researcher in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, focusing on their applications to justice and social welfare.^[4] Advised by Jon Kleinberg, she completed her Ph.D. in computer science in 2019, becoming the first Black woman to earn a doctoral degree in computer science in Cornell University's history.^{[21,4,60,53,96]} Her dissertation made notable contributions across multiple fields of computer science, receiving the 2020 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award and an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award.^[39,60,21] Afterwards, she was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows before taking up an assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley.

Abebe studied under the Ethiopian National Curriculum at Nazareth School before winning a merit-based scholarship to attend the International Community School of Addis Ababa for high school.^[44] She studied at Harvard University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and subsequently a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics, during which time she served as a staff writer for The Harvard Crimson covering the Cambridge public school system from 2009 to 2011.^[44,18] She then attended Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge as a Governor William Shirley Scholar, completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos and earning a Master of Advanced Study in pure mathematics under the supervision of Imre Leader.^[19] Abebe completed her PhD in computer science at Cornell University under the supervision of Jon Kleinberg, becoming the first Black woman to earn a computer science doctorate in the university's history, with her doctoral dissertation receiving the 2020 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award and an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award.^[32,35,37] Abebe attributes her commitment to social good and her interest in combining computer science with inequality studies to her upbringing in Addis Ababa—where she experienced the income inequalities and social issues affecting Ethiopia—as well as her attendance at Cambridge public school board meetings. Through these experiences, she emphasizes the potential social harms of inequitable algorithmic design in her work, remarking, "I realized that if you work in computer science, applied mathematics, or a similar field, in addition to working on very interesting data-driven mathematical problems, one can think about issues that directly affect society."^[2,21,25]

Abebe's research, conducted across Cornell, Harvard, and Cambridge universities, develops mathematical and algorithmic frameworks and AI techniques focused on inequality, distributive justice, poverty dynamics, the allocation of scarce resources, and barriers to access for underserved and historically disadvantaged populations.^{[2,11,22,20,24,61,37,10,23,51]} Her research on Africa includes a paper analyzing search queries to examine health information needs across all 54 African countries—one of the first known works to use large-scale web and social media-based analytics to study continental health—as well as collaboration with Abeba Birhane, George Obaido, and Sekou Remy on research into the barriers to data sharing in Africa.^[62,86] In 2016, Abebe and Kira Goldner co-founded the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) initiative alongside a 12-member multi-institutional reading group, establishing a multidisciplinary collective that connects research communities and hosts an annual workshop series applying algorithms and mechanism design to improve social welfare; she has since co-organized the initiative with Irene Lo and Ana-Andrea Stoica.^[2,24,25] In 2021, she co-founded the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO) and served as the inaugural program co-chair.^[23,31] Abebe also co-founded Black in AI with Timnit Gebru in 2016, an international network of 1,500 researchers working in AI that provides networking opportunities and holds annual workshops at NeurIPS (beginning with its first workshop in 2017); her leadership of its Academic Program earned her inclusion on the 2019 Bloomberg 50 list.^[1,6,25]

Throughout 2019, Abebe served alongside AI experts Kate Crawford, Dina Katabi, Daphne Koller, and Eric Lander on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on AI, tasked with producing a comprehensive report and recommendations on AI in health that were unanimously approved by the advisory committee to the director and NIH Director Francis Collins.^{[23,21,54,24,31,25]} In 2019, Abebe was inducted into the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow, making her the second Junior Fellow holding a doctorate in computer science, the first female computer scientist in the society's history, and the first Black computer scientist (though some sources specifically state the first Black female computer scientist) in its history.^{[25,27,26,24,54]}

Abebe joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor—though Italian Wikipedia describes her as an associate professor—focusing on artificial intelligence; information, data, network, and communication sciences; and theory.^{[7,26,28,25,27]} She is recognized as the first Black female professor in the history of the EECS department and the second in the history of UC Berkeley's College of Engineering.^{[7,27,29,30,1]} Abebe leads the Berkeley Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (BEAAMO) research group and is affiliated with the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS), and the Center for the Theoretical Foundations of Learning, Inference, Information, Intelligence, Mathematics, and Microeconomics at Berkeley (CLIMB), where she contributes to work on data, inference, and decision-making.^{[31,28,29,30,1,4,33,38,53,54,23]} For her contributions, she has received several honors, including being named among MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" in 2019, being inducted into the Andrew Carnegie Fellows in 2022, and being named to New African Magazine's list of the "100 Most Influential Africans" in 2024 for her work combating inequality with AI.^[8]

In 2016, Abebe co-founded Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), a multidisciplinary research collective that uses algorithms and mechanism design to tackle inequality, with Kira Goldner alongside a multi-institutional reading group of 12 members.^[32] Since then, she has been co-organizing the initiative with Irene Lo and Ana-Andreea Stoica. MD4SG organizes an annual workshop series and conferences to highlight work, boost research, and connect the community of researchers committed to using algorithms to improve societal welfare and well-being.

In 2021, she co-launched the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO) and served as an inaugural program co-chair.^[33,55,66] Abebe was honored as a pioneer in the 2019 MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, in part for her work co-founding MD4SG.^[34,35] Her doctoral dissertation received the 2020 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award and an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award for offering foundations for this emerging research area.^[36,56,40]

In 2016, Abebe co-founded Black in AI, a network of approximately 1,500 researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence, with Timnit Gebru.^[37,26,63] In that same year, she also co-founded the research program MD4SG (Mechanism Design for Social Good).^[38] The organization organizes annual workshops at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and offers networking and collaboration opportunities for its members.

Through Black in AI, Abebe spearheaded educational initiatives including the Academic Program—such as a graduate application mentorship program—which aimed to increase access and academic support for the AI research community from underrepresented groups.^[38] For her leadership and contributions, she was recognized on the 2019 Bloomberg 50 list as one of the figures to watch.^[38] At Cornell University, Abebe was involved in mentoring students from underrepresented groups. During her time at Cornell University, she helped efforts that led to an unprecedented number of underrepresented minority students enrolling in the computer science PhD program.^[89]

Throughout her career, Abebe has received various awards and honors for her contributions in the academic field and technological innovation, having been repeatedly distinguished on lists of scientists noted for their potential and contributions. In 2018, she was selected as One to Watch on the Bloomberg 50 list, which highlights individuals with great potential in various fields.^[38] That same year, she was awarded the Harvard-Cambridge Fellowship from Harvard University, received a Cornell University Fellowship, and served as a Graduate Resident Fellow at Cornell University.

In 2019, she became a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a prestigious academic community providing support for talented young scholars, was named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Under 35 list recognizing influential young innovators in technology, and received the Cornell Social Justice Award from Cornell University.^[35] In 2020, she was awarded the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award in data mining and machine learning, although Igbo Wikipedia records this honor as the ACM SIGKDD Paper Award.^[39,56] She also received an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award in computational economics, while Igbo Wikipedia states that she was nominated for the award. Also in 2020, she received the Rising Star Award from Innovation for Equity, recognition from the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, and inclusion in the 100 Most Influential Young Africans list by the African Youth Awards (also cited as the 100 Most Influential African Youth by Africa Awards).^{[64,42,41,40]}

In 2022, she was selected as a member of the Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, an honor bestowed upon prominent scholars and thinkers contributing to research in the social sciences and humanities.^[64,42] The Igbo Wikipedia also lists several of her academic works and topics alongside her honors, including "Algorithmic Foundations for Financial Cycles", "Fairness, Equity, and Power in Algorithmic Decision-Making", "Stories and Discourse on Data Sharing in Africa", "Allocating Relief to Areas of Financial Distress", "Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Depression, Anxiety, and Suicidal Ideation among Ph.D. Students", "Characterizing Community Traits of Mortality Using Social Media", "Computing and Social Change", "Truthful Cardinal Mechanisms for One-Sided Matching", "Artificial Intelligence and Journalism", "Using Search Queries to Understand Health Information Needs in Africa", "Mathematical Perspectives on Social Welfare and Accessibility", "Mechanism Design for Social Good", "Mitigating Extreme Exposure in Viral Marketing", "Opinion Dynamics with Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion", "Report on the Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good", "Simple Mechanisms and High-Connectivity Networks", "Fair Division via Social Comparisons", "Analysis of Breast Cancer Incidence, Events, and Mortality across US Regions", "Brouwer's Inequality for Higher-Order Laplacian Observations", and "Long-Range Spin-Spin Coupling via Floating Gates".^{[67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,39,56]}

External links include a profile in the MIT Technology Review, described in English Wikipedia as covering how she uses algorithms and AI to fight socioeconomic inequality in 'Pioneers, In breaking with the old ways, they create better AI, antibiotics, and even architecture', whereas Igbo Wikipedia describes it as using algorithms and AI to fight social inequality in 'Innovators, breaking old ways, they are creating better AI, antibiotics and even architecture'. Her external links also list the identifier mO15JvwAAAAJ.