AJ Alvero

About

I am an Assistant Research Professor with the Cornell University Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society with affiliations in the Departments of Information Science and Sociology. My research is focused on questions about outward expression and personal essence: can we separate the art from the artist? The author from the text? The speaker from their speech? I use these questions as intellectual starting points to examine culture, language, and social processes of evaluation, particularly in high-stakes settings like college admissions and parole hearings, through the massive amounts of data generated therein. I leverage administrative, experimental, AI, and social media data to show how individual and shared identity shape human expression to better understand how demography and culture intersect to create the information we use to build and fuel the technology that sorts, stratifies, and organizes social life. This work has also increasingly drawn me toward examinations of the tools, methods, and frameworks used by researchers in these settings.

AJ Alvero is a computational social scientist at the Cornell University Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society with departmental affiliations in Sociology, Information Science, and Computer Science. Most of his research examines moments of high stakes evaluation, specifically college admissions and parole hearings. He addresses questions and topics related to the sociological inquiry of artificial intelligence, culture, language, education, race and ethnicity, and organizational decision making. This work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Science Advances, Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Methods & Research, Journal of Big Data, and other venues. AJ earned his PhD at Stanford University along with an MS in statistics. Prior to entering academia, AJ was a high school English teacher in Miami, FL.

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