Burghardt is a Computer Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute who specializes in complex science, geospatial analysis, and reducing biases with data analysis. He has papers in journals such as NPJ Computational Materials and Communications Physics, and in conferences, such as ICWSM, ASONAM, and CSCW. Burghardt has been a Principal Investigator in grants from Amazon and ISI, co-PI in grants from DARPA, and co-organized the Inclusive and Fair Speech Technologies special session at the INTERSPEECH 2022 Conference. Burghardt received a PhD and BS (Magna Cum Laude with High Honors) in Physics at the University of Maryland in 2016 and 2012, respectively.

Keith Burghardt's main research interests are at the intersection of complex science, geospatial analysis, and AI fairness. Namely, Burghardt utilizes complex science to better understand emergent phenomena, such as how influence spreads on large social networks. Burghardt also applies complexity to ongoing geospatial research, including how cities self-organize to produce universal patterns. To understand the reasons for emergent city patterns, Burghardt also analyzes different ways cities are defined and how they evolve over time. Finally, to address AI fairness, Burghardt applies complex science to understand how human biases affect algorithms. This research covers a range of topics such as how human heuristics affect ranking algorithms or how hate or anti-vaccine sentiment spread and affect social media algorithms.

2021: ISI Meritorious Service Award
2018: SIAM Travel Award - NS18
2018: International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) Scholarship
2016: ISI Director’s Intern Award
2015: Conference on Complex Systems Starred Paper Award
2012-2014: University of Maryland Dean’s Fellowship