HTTP/2 200 server: GitHub.com content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 last-modified: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:41:30 GMT access-control-allow-origin: * etag: W/"693b3a8a-a721" expires: Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:43:08 GMT cache-control: max-age=600 content-encoding: gzip x-proxy-cache: MISS x-github-request-id: E98C:2D8B9D:A867F9:BD446A:69545324 accept-ranges: bytes age: 0 date: Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:33:08 GMT via: 1.1 varnish x-served-by: cache-bom-vanm7210091-BOM x-cache: MISS x-cache-hits: 0 x-timer: S1767133989.500360,VS0,VE208 vary: Accept-Encoding x-fastly-request-id: d1b5c155cc9a936a755d3ea7c56c4be7aa8a5e36 content-length: 8081

Ryan Steed

I am a research scientist at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I am supported by an AI Policy Fellowship from Princeton University. Previously, I completed a Ph.D. in Machine Learning & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Alessandro Acquisti.

I conduct empirical evaluations of algorithmic systems to help improve tech governance.

• Google Scholar
• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• CV
• ryan (at) rbsteed.com

Research

Working Papers

• Reproducibility of Social Science Research Under Privacy Noise · 2025
  Ryan Steed, Eduardo Abraham Schnadower Mustri, & Alessandro Acquisti.

  PDF
• Algorithmic Decoupling and the Adoption of 'Privacy-Preserving' Analytics · 2025
  Ryan Steed & Alessandro Acquisti.

  George Duncan Award for Best Second Research Paper @ Heinz College

  PDF Talk

Peer-Reviewed Publications

• Quantifying Privacy Risks of Public Statistics to Residents of Subsidized Housing · 2025
  Harvard Data Science Review, Special Issue 6 (August 2025).

  Ryan Steed, Diana Qing, & Steven Wu.

  PDF
• Towards AI Accountability Infrastructure: Gaps and Opportunities in AI Audit Tooling · 2025
  Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

  Victor Ojewale, Ryan Steed, Briana Vecchione, Abeba Birhane, & Inioluwa Deborah Raji.

  PDF Code
• AI Auditing: The Broken Bus on the Road to AI Accountability · 2024
  2nd IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML).

  Abeba Birhane, Ryan Steed, Victor Ojewale, Briana Vecchione, & Inioluwa Deborah Raji.

  Distinguished Paper Award

  PDF Code Talk
• Policy Impacts of Statistical Uncertainty and Privacy · 2022
  Science.

  Ryan Steed, Terrance Liu, Steven Wu, & Alessandro Acquisti.

  Nextgov & JD Supra · Suresh Konda Award for Best First Research Paper @ Heinz College

  PDF Code Talk
• Upstream Mitigation Is Not All You Need: Testing the Bias Transfer Hypothesis in Pre-Trained Language Models · 2022
  Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

  Ryan Steed, Swetasudha Panda, Ari Kobren, & Michael Wick.

  PDF Talk
• Image Representations Learned With Unsupervised Pre-Training Contain Human-like Biases · 2021
  Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).

  Ryan Steed & Aylin Caliskan.

  MIT Tech Review (Melissa Heikkilä), Vice, MIT Tech Review (Karen Hao), & OneZero

  PDF Code Talk
• A Set of Distinct Facial Traits Learned by Machines Is Not Predictive of Appearance Bias in the Wild · 2021
  AI & Ethics.

  Ryan Steed & Aylin Caliskan.

  PDF Code
• Heuristic-Based Weak Learning for Automated Decision-Making · 2020
  Participatory Approaches to Machine Learning @ ICML.

  Ryan Steed & Benjamin Williams.

  PDF Code Talk

Columns & Comments

• Accelerating AI Innovation Through Measurement Science · 2025
  CAISI Research Blog, National Institute of Standards and Technology.

  Drew Keller, Ryan Steed, Stevie Bergman, & the Applied Systems Team at CAISI.
• Comment on NIST–2023–0309 · 2024
  Request for Information (RFI) Related to NIST’s Assignments Under Sections 4.1, 4.5 and 11 of the Executive Order Concerning Artificial Intelligence, FR Doc # 2023-28232.

  Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Abeba Birhane, Briana Vecchione, Ryan Steed, & Victor Ojewale.

  PDF
• Comment on NTIA-2023-0005 · 2023
  NTIA AI Accountability Request for Comment, FR Doc # 2023-07776.

  Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Briana Vecchione, Abeba Birhane, Ryan Steed, & Victor Ojewale.

  Cited in NTIA AI Accountability Policy Report

  PDF
• Feedback on Data Access, Digital Services Act · 2023
  European Commission, Call for Evidence: Delegated Regulation on data access provided for in the Digital Services Act.

  Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Briana Vecchione, Abeba Birhane, Ryan Steed, & Victor Ojewale.

  Cited in Digital Services Act: Summary report on the call for evidence on the Delegated Regulation on data access
• Learning to Live with Privacy-Preserving Analytics · 2023
  Communications of the ACM.

  Alessandro Acquisti & Ryan Steed.

  PDF
• Managing the risks of inevitably biased visual artificial intelligence systems · 2022
  Blog for Brookings TechTank.

  Aylin Caliskan & Ryan Steed.

Other Projects

• Transparency & Explainability for Property Valuation · 2020
  Presentation of our work improving property valuation transparency in Cook County, Illinois.

  Maria Ines Aran, Ryan Steed, Italo Batista, & Lily Liu-Krason.

  Code Talk
• Measuring the Evolution of Innovation in Patent Citation Networks · 2019
  Ryan Steed & Rahul Simha.

  2nd Prize, Politics & Economics @ GW Research Showcase Poster Competition

  PDF Code

News

Our team at CAISI released a blog post highlighting open questions for AI measurement science.

12/02/2025

Excited to join the Applied Systems team in the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

08/15/2025

I’ll be discussing differential privacy, law, and policy at the Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy Workshop.

06/01/2025

I successfully defended my dissertation. I’m now an AI Policy Fellow at Princeton AI Lab.

05/09/2025

I’m presenting a poster at TPDP & giving a talk at the OpenDP Community Meeting DP Beyond Algorithms Workshop this week — stop by and see our work on census privacy and DP adoption.

08/18/2024