Machine Learning for Socio-technical Systems Lab

The Machine Learning for Socio-technical Systems Lab (ML4STS) is a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Rhode Island, directed by Dr. Sarah M Brown. The lab was established in 2020 when Dr. Brown joined URI as an Assistant Professor.

The lab's mission centers on understanding how machine learning interacts with the complex socio-technical systems into which algorithms are deployed. The research program has three main thrusts: applying data science using ML models to understand the world in collaboration with domain scientists, studying and evaluating ML systems directly, and building tools to help data scientists employ best practices. The majority of the lab's work focuses on fairness of automated decision-making systems.

Key active projects include developing a benchmark for evaluating fair data-driven decision-making with large language models (funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund), model-based fairness intervention assessment, task-level fairness evaluation, and studying perceptions of AI fairness in collaboration with Brown University. The lab also works on simulation-based AI safety curricula for students.

Dr. Brown's background includes a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley under Professor Michael Jordan, and a Data Science Initiative Postdoc at Brown University. She is the treasurer emeritus of Women in Machine Learning, Inc., and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient.

The lab received an NSF CAREER Award in 2025 worth $600,000 over five years for the project "Realizing Sociotechnical Machine Learning through Modeling, Explanations, and Reflections." Other funding includes a 2021 IBM Global University Program Academic Award and a grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund's Fairness Track. The lab team currently includes two PhD students and approximately eight undergraduate researchers, along with a growing list of alumni.