Board member since 2022
Committee(s): Audit

Christopher Homan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. A native of Jamestown, NY, Dr. Homan received his A.B. in mathematics from Cornell in 1992 and Ph.D. in computer science in 2003 from the University of Rochester, including internships at Compaq Research and Los Alamos National Laboratories. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and private sources. He is the author or co-author of over fifty peer-reviewed publications. His research focuses on problems of fairness, bias, and representation in a number of different settings, including theoretical computer science, complex systems, computer-mediated randomized control trials, community-based -participatory research, and machine learning. His earliest work applied complexity theory to ranked-choice voting systems and complex systems. He later collaborated with social psychologists on a system for controlling in the topology of a communication network among study participants in randomized control trials. It was used to study the impact of network topology on rumor formation. He later applied network science to study social networks, which led to new methods for recruiting study participants from hidden, underrepresented populations that are resistant to traditional survey methods, among other things. His current work, which came from a community-based participatory research group that he belonged to for five years, focuses on machine learning problems with multiple solutions, particularly where different subpopulations have distinct preferences for which solutions are best. Such problems are common in settings such as machine translation, offensive language recognition, language complexity recognition, public health surveillance, and many others.