Aleksandra profile picture

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University. I'm also excited to be part of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

I study societal impacts of algorithms, machine learning and AI, and develop and deploy algorithms and technologies that enable data-driven innovations while preserving privacy and fairness. I also design and perform algorithm and AI audits, including for generative AI.

Contact

korolova@princeton.edu

309 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540

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I am accepting Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.

Prospective Ph.D. students should apply to the Ph.D. program in the Department of Computer Science or in the School of Public and International Affairs and indicate an interest in working with me in your statement.

Prospective postdocs should reach out to me directly.

News and updates

Sep
2025
:

Congratulations to Jane on being named a 2026 Siebel Scholar!

May
2025
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Jane and I will be writing "Eclectic Notes on AI" on Substack. Subscribe!

Apr
2025
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Three papers accepted at FAccT 2025. Congratulations Jane, Zeyu, and Basi!

Mar
2025
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Honored to receive the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for RAPPOR, together with Úlfar Erlingsson and Vasyl Pihur.

Feb
2025
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The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a lawsuit against Meta for its discriminatory ad delivery practices in education. The lawsuit cites research from our FAccT 2024 paper in its complaint.

Research

Privacy, algorithmic fairness, accountability and transparency are currently at the center of key debates across academia, industry and policy. My research sits at the intersection of these topics and aims to leverage algorithmic thinking in order to provide new solution spaces that allow for a better balance between individual interests, societal goals, and technical innovation.

I develop algorithmic and systems advances that can enable data-driven innovations while preserving individual privacy, defined in the paradigm of differential privacy.

I work to understand how opaque machine learning systems may be affecting individuals and society, and to develop techniques for mitigating their negative consequences.

Read Research Statement

Recent Publications

ReliabilityRAG: Effective and Provably Robust Defense for RAG-based Web-Search
Zeyu Shen, Basileal Imana, Tong Wu, Chong Xiang, Prateek Mittal, Aleksandra Korolova

To appear at the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).

Press
External Evaluation of Discrimination Mitigation Efforts in Meta’s Ad Delivery
Basileal Imana, Zeyu Shen, John Heidemann, and Aleksandra Korolova

Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2025).

In Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC 2025).

Best Paper Award (FAccT 2025)

Press
Adultification Bias in LLMs and Text-to-Image Models
Jane Castleman, Aleksandra Korolova

Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2025).

Non-archival at Workshop on Responsible Generative AI (@ CVPR 2025).

Press
See All Publications

Privacy

fairness

Biography

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where I was a Cisco Systems Stanford Graduate Fellow advised by Prof. Rajeev Motwani (RIP, Rajeev) and Prof. Ashish Goel. My Ph.D. thesis focused on protecting privacy when mining and sharing user data, and has been recognized by 2011-2012 Arthur L. Samuel Thesis Award for the best Computer Science Ph.D. thesis. While at Stanford, I was fortunate to intern at Microsoft Research, Facebook, Yahoo! Research, and PARC. I am a co-winner of the 2011 PET Award for exposing privacy violations of microtargeted advertising and a runner-up for the 2015 PET Award for RAPPOR, the first commercial deployment of differential privacy. My most recent research on discrimination in ad delivery, received an honorable mention and recognition of contribution to diversity and inclusion at CSCW in 2019 and was runner-up for Best Student Paper Award at the 2021 Web Conference. I received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2024, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025. Prior to joining Princeton, I was a Research Scientist at Google, a WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, and a Privacy Advisor at Snap.

PErsonal

I grew up in Latvia and graduated from Riga secondary school #40, spending fun weekends preparing for math olympiads at NMS and learning algorithms at Progmeistars. I am indebted for the many opportunities I have had to my family, amazing teachers at the above institutions, and to the George Soros Foundation. My outstanding high school mathematics teacher, Viktor Glukhov, now teaches and organizes math circles online.

I loved spending my college years at MIT, and especially enjoyed the classes taught by Prof. Patrick Winston. I first tried doing research in Dan Spielman's error-correcting codes class and Joe Gallian's Duluth REU.

In my free time, I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling, skiing and playing tennis.

I proudly support MEET, MIT, EFF, and The Markup.