Trust and Fraud Detection at Scale: Instagram’s Stephanie Moyerman

Stephanie Moyerman’s background in cosmology and astrophysics — where she worked with large data sets, looking for a signal among what was mostly noise — prepared her well for a career in data science and ethics. Today, she is the data science director of well-being at Instagram, where she works to enhance trust, safety, and integrity for users of the social media platform.

Stephanie joins Sam and Shervin on this episode to discuss how applying artificial intelligence to social media enables Instagram to detect fraud and abuse at scale to help protect users, as well as the importance of human input in AI feedback loops and the need for more experienced practitioners in the field. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

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Guest bio:

Stephanie Moyerman is the data science director of well-being at Instagram, where she works to minimize negative experiences and maximize positive experiences on the platform. Previously, she was the senior director of risk and trust science at eBay and a senior science manager in Amazon’s Customer Trust and Partner Support unit, where she worked to protect the e-commerce platforms from bad actors.

Moyerman has a doctorate in physics (experimental cosmology) and a master’s in computational science, math, and engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She also has dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics from Harvey Mudd College.

Moyerman enjoys many hobbies, including running, hiking, surfing, snowboarding, judo, jujitsu, glassblowing, flying airplanes, and racing cars.

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