Cindy Lin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Information Science and the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University. In Fall 2022, she will be an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Her current research investigates the presence of bias and inequality in artificial intelligence (AI) systems deployed within the environmental sciences. She works with machine learning practitioners and environmental scientists to consider how decolonial and liberatory approaches to AI can promote environmental justice and sustainability. At present, Cindy is working on a book project that locates ground truth within the history of machine learning as a shifting political and scientific category. This book asks how ground truth and its claim to accuracy and evidentiality have shape and been shaped by transnational exchanges of mapping, surveying, and computing expertise between Southeast Asia and the United States.

She is also involved in a range of collaborative research projects related to transnational technology labor, racial relations, and environmental issues, including a multi-sited ethnographic project on the racialization of Chinese tech professionals in the American IT industry amidst rising US-China geopolitical tensions as well as community advocacy for clean air in Chinatown, Manhattan.

Her work has been published in leading computing venues such as ACM CHI, TOCHI, DIS and PD, as well as journals such as Social Text. She has also co-authored a multigraph, Technoprecarious (MIT Press, 2020). She holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cindy enjoys playing badminton, dancing, and cooking Southeast Asian cuisine.

Website: lincindy.com