Mathematical Sciences Foundry

On Monday October 3rd at 4pm in Olin 201 , Megan Price , Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group will present a few case studies involving violent human rights violations globally and will talk about how data analysis plays a role in tracking and quantifying these violations. We interact with the outputs from quantitative models multiple times a day. As methods from statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence become more ubiquitous, so too do calls to ensure that these methods are used “for good” or at the very least, ethically. But how do we know if we are achieving “good”? This question will frame a presentation of case studies from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a Bay Area nonprofit that uses data science to analyze patterns of violence. Examples will include collaborations with US-based organizations investigating police misconduct and partnerships with international truth commissions and war crimes prosecutors. HRDAG proje...

  On Monday September 19th at 4pm in Olin 201 Martin Šefl will talk about the method of principle component analysis (PCA) in the context of regression on data from the United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) . The United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) studies actinide (Pu, Am, and U) biokinetics and tissue dosimetry by following up former nuclear workers with documented internal deposition of these radioactive elements. The USTUR research relies heavily upon postmortem autopsy findings and radiochemical analyses of donated tissues. Plutonium is a radioactive element first produced and isolated in the 1940s. The skeleton is a major plutonium retention site in the human body. The estimation of the total plutonium activity in the skeleton is a challenging problem. For most tissue donors at the USTUR, a limited number of bone samples is available. Typically, the total skeleton activity is calculated using plutonium activity concentration ( C ...