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Alex Berke

Graduate Student
Contact Information:
Groups
  • City Science

Alex graduated from the City Science group with a PhD in 2025, with prior degrees in math and computer science from Brown University.

Her PhD thesis was about transforming digital traces into public goods in the age of commercial surveillance.  The digital traces at the focus of her work include mobile phone locations, web browsing data, purchase histories - the types of digital traces that consumers passively and unavoidably generate through everyday activities. Her thesis work also included publishing a first-of-its-kind open dataset of Amazon purchase histories, crowdsourced from thousands of US consumers with their informed consent.

While in the City Science group, Alex also worked on a variety of projects in transportation and sustainability.

Before coming to the Media Lab, Alex lived in New York, participating in the arts community while professionally working at the intersection of technology and social impact. Most recently she was working as an engineer on Google Search, focused on news credibility and fighting disinformation. 

Her non-academic publications range from news stories about Bitcoin to a coloring book about math.

Publication Research

Measuring risks inherent to our digital economies using Amazon purchase histories from US consumers

Berke, A., Larson, K., Pentland, S. and Calacci, D., 2025. Measuring risks inherent to our digital economies using Amazon purchase histories from US consumers. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18774.
Project Research

Crowdsourcing purchase histories

We crowdsourced and published a first-of-its-kind open dataset that contains Amazon purchase histories, spanning 2018 to 2022, from more th…
Post Research

Sustainable Consumption: How labels impact the way we eat

Alex Berke and Kent Larson of the Media Lab's City Science group co-authored a paper around these issues, recently published in Appetite.
Publication Research

Evaluating Amazon Effects and the Limited Impact of COVID-19 With Purchases Crowdsourced from US Consumers

A. Berke, D. Calacci, A. Pentland, and K. Larson. Evaluating Amazon Effects and the Limited Impact of COVID-19 With Purchases Crowdsourced from US Consumers. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10596
Publication Research

Insights from an experiment crowdsourcing data from thousands of US Amazon users: The importance of transparency, money, and data use

Alex Berke, Robert Mahari, Sandy Pentland, Kent Larson, and Dana Calacci. 2024. Insights from an experiment crowdsourcing data from thousands of US Amazon users: The importance of transparency, money, and data use. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2, Article 466 (November 2024), 48 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3687005
Publication Research

Open e-commerce 1.0, five years of crowdsourced U.S. Amazon purchase histories with user demographics

Berke, A., Calacci, D., Mahari, R. Yabe, T., Larson, K., & Pentland, S. Open e-commerce 1.0, five years of crowdsourced U.S. Amazon purchase histories with user demographics. Sci Data 11, 491 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03329-6
Project Research

Zero-knowledge (ZK) Tax

zkTax is a zero-knowledge tax disclosure system that allows individuals to make provable claims about select information in their tax retur…
Project Research

Drone package delivery and consumer privacy

Door-to-door drone package deliveries are taking off across the US.  In this work we expose and study a newly emerging privacy is…
Project Research

The negative impact of vegetarian and vegan labels: Results from randomized controlled experiments

OverviewWe found that vegan and vegetarian labels commonly found on menu items have a significantly negative impact on consumer's likelihoo…
Publication Research

Preserving Sustainability Gains of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of MIT Campus Commuting

Berke, A., Doorley, R., Alfonso, L., & Larson, K. (2022). Preserving Sustainability Gains of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of MIT Campus Commuting. Transportation Research Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981221088776
Publication Research

Routing with Privacy for Drone Package Delivery Systems

Ding, G., Berke, A., Gopalakrishnan, K., Degue, K., Balakrishnan, H., & Li, M. (2022). Routing with Privacy for Drone Package Delivery Systems. International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT) 2022.
Publication Research

Generating synthetic mobility data for a realistic population with RNNs to improve utility and privacy

Alex Berke, Ronan Doorley, Kent Larson, Esteban Moro. 2022. Generating synthetic mobility data for a realistic population with RNNs to improve utility and privacy. In Proceedings of The 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC ’22). 955-959. https://doi.org/10.1145/3477314.3507230
Publication Research

Privacy Limitations Of Interest-based Advertising On The Web: A Post-mortem Empirical Analysis Of Google’s FLoC

Alex Berke and Dan Calacci. 2022. Privacy Limitations of Interest-based Advertising on The Web: A Post-mortem Empirical Analysis of Google’s FLoC. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’22), November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3560626
Publication Research

Using mobile phone data to estimate dynamic population changes and improve the understanding of a pandemic: A case study in Andorra

Berke A, Doorley R, Alonso L, Arroyo V, Pons M, & Larson, K. (2022) Using mobile phone data to estimate dynamic population changes and improve the understanding of a pandemic: A case study in Andorra. PLOS ONE 17(4): e0264860. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264860
Publication Research

Private Delivery Networks: Extended Abstract

Berke, A., Lee, N., Chwalek, P. (2021). Private Delivery Networks: Extended Abstract. Presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Obfuscation, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, 7 May.
Project Research

Mobility and COVID-19 in Andorra

Country-scale analysis of high-resolution mobility patterns and infection spreadThe MIT Media Lab City Science group and the Andorra Innova…
Post Research

Private Delivery Networks (Nomadic Systems Group)

The past years of climate crises and health epidemics have led to the proliferation of nomadic communities and a near reliance on e-commerce
Post Research

piloting [bike]swarm

Synchronizing light across riders, [bike]swarm technology enhances the safety and joy of sustainable mobility by illuminating the rider com…
Publication Research

Urban Mobility Swarms: A Scalable Implementation

Berke A., Nawyn J., Lengeling T.S., Larson K. (2020) Urban Mobility Swarms: A Scalable Implementation. In: Arai K., Kapoor S., Bhatia R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1229. Springer, Cham
Publication Research

Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math

Berke, Alex, et al. Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math. MIT Press (February 2020).
Book, Feb. 2020
Publication Research

Contact Tracing Technologies: Methods and trade-offs

Alex Berke and Kent Larson, City Science group, MIT Media Lab (2020). https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157499
Archived
Project Research

Social Distancing in a Pandemic

What anonymized geolocation data can tell us about the effectiveness of social distancingThe World Health Organization has officially decla…
Archived
Publication Research

Assessing Disease Exposure Risk with Location Data: A Proposal for Cryptographic Preservation of Privacy

Alex Berke, Michiel Bakker, Praneeth Vepakomma, Kent Larson, Alex `Sandy' Pentland. (March 31 2020). "Assessing Disease Exposure Risk with Location Data: A Proposal for Cryptographic Preservation of Privacy." Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.14412
Project Research

Assessing Disease Exposure Risk With Location Histories And Protecting Privacy

Governments and researchers around the world are implementing digital contact tracing solutions to stem the spread of infectious disease, n…
Project Research

Private Location Data for the Public Good and Urban Understanding

There is a continuous and ubiquitous collection of precise, timestamped, geolocation data from apps and devices, being amassed by private f…
Article Research

If You Ever Read An Article on Online Voting: Make It This One

"Out of those approximately 17,000 articles, I profoundly enjoyed and learned from this one, written by Alex Berke, MIT Media Lab."
Project Research

Crypto Voting + US Elections: Reality and Science Fiction

This is a two-part project. One part is about reality. The other part is science fiction. Both are about mobile, blockchain, and cryptograp…
Publication Research

The Tradeoff Between the Utility and Risk of Location Data and Implications for Public Good

Calacci, Dan, Alex Berke, Kent Larson, Sandy Pentland. "The tradeoff between the utility and risk of location data and implications for public good." Presented at the Oxford & London School of Economics Connected Life conference. (2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09350
Publication Research

Bike Swarm

Berke, A., Sanchez Lengeling, T., Nawyn, J., & Larson, K. (2019, November). Bike Swarm. In Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1-4). ACM.
Project Research

Income, Race, Bikes

Is the placement of bike-share docks equitable?This interactive map explores the question visually.The map shows the addition of bike-share…
Post Events

BLACK MIRROR

Viewing and Discussion Series
Project Research

AR Enhanced Wall Plants: Escape Pod

An environment of plants and mirrors that extends beyond the terrarium walls. 
Project Research

[bike] swarm

As bikes navigate city streets after dark, they are often equipped with lights. The lights make the bikes visible to cars or other bikers, …
Post Research

A Future-Forward Proposal for a System of Streets and Autonomous Vehicles

ABSTRACT   The impending introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has posed regulatory and ethical questions regarding how they …
Event Events

Wallpaper: A mathematical coloring workshop

Using color to explore the intersection of art and mathematics.
Friday
February 1, 2019
5:00pm — 7:00pm ET
New Brunswick, NJ
Project Research

CityScope Cooper Hewitt

We are at the dawn of a mobility revolution, where autonomous vehicles will replace cars controlled by humans. We can imagine this developi…