Emily Chao
Pronouns: they/them
By Day
I'm currently on a personal sabbatical, exploring opportunities in tech policy as well as doing some personal education to eventually re-enter the Trust and Safety engineering world.
Previously, I was a data engineer at Recidiviz, supporting platform expansion for nudging criminal justice agencies towards decarceration, and an ML engineer at Twitter, working on detections and remediations that supported user trust and safety and prevented harassment, abuse and manipulation in online discourse on the platform. My experience at Twitter primarily informs my own views on how we should organize as tech workers today.
I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm currently living on unceded Ohlone land (Oakland, CA).
Areas of Interest: trust and safety in online discourse, ethical and fair ML/AI, technology policy, socio-political and justice-oriented technology
By Night
I help organize the East Bay Alternative Books and Zines Fest and was both a cohort member and now a co-steward of Collective Action School (formerly Logic School), a community school for tech workers.
I dabble in creative writing, street and landscape photography, and mild (emphasis: mild) data art as creative art practices. I love to figure skate. I also enjoy cooking Chinese food, reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels, watching anything animated, curating and degendering fashion, and listening to albums from beginning to end.
Causes I Care About: Asian American political solidarity, queer/trans political solidarity and power-building, Black Lives Matter, prison and police abolition, sustainable and delightful urbanism, anti-capitalism