Past Events
Events List Navigation
SES PhD Admissions Webinar
Ali Jadbabaie (MIT)
online
Learn about admission to the Social and Engineering Systems Doctoral Program. Webinars are led by a member of the IDSS faculty, who introduces the program and answers your questions. Please register in advance. SES Webinar Flier.
Find out more »The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
Raj Chetty (Harvard University)
32-155
Abstract: We construct a publicly available atlas of children’s outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children’s earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children’s outcomes vary sharply across nearby areas: for children of parents at…
Find out more »Bias Reduction and Asymptotic Efficiency in Estimation of Smooth Functionals of High-Dimensional Covariance
Vladimir Koltchinskii (Georgia Institute of Technology)
E18-304
Abstract: We discuss a recent approach to bias reduction in a problem of estimation of smooth functionals of high-dimensional parameters of statistical models. In particular, this approach has been developed in the case of estimation of functionals of covariance operator Σ : Rd → Rd of the form f(Σ), B based on n i.i.d. observations X1, . . . , Xn sampled from the normal distribution with mean zero and covariance Σ, f : R → R being a sufficiently…
Find out more »IDSS Science Speed Dating Event
E18-304
Join IDSS faculty, postdocs, and graduate students for the first IDSS Science Speed Dating Event on Thursday, November 29. The purpose of this event is to help the participants to expand their network, find new research partners, and strengthen the IDSS community. The event includes lunch. To register for the IDSS Science Speed Dating Event, please sign up here. Please contact Doro Unger-Lee at dor@mit.edu with any questions you may have about this event.
Find out more »Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall
Margaret Roberts (UC San Diego)
32-141
Abstract: As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, this book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese…
Find out more »SES PhD Admissions Webinar
Ali Jadbabaie (MIT)
online
Learn about admission to the Social and Engineering Systems Doctoral Program. Webinars are led by a member of the IDSS faculty, who introduces the program and answers your questions. Please register in advance. SES Webinar Flier.
Find out more »Saurabh Amin
Saurabh Amin (MIT)
32-155
LIDS Seminar Series Speaker: Saurabh Amin Affiliation: MIT ____________________________________ The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Benjamin Hobbs
Benjamin Hobbs (Johns Hopkins University)
32-155
Title Talk: Modeling Electricity Markets with Complementarity: Why It's Important (and Fun) Speaker: Benjamin Hobbs Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University Abstract: Electric power: done wrong, it drags the economy and environment down; done right, it could help to create a more efficient, brighter, and cleaner future. Better policy, planning, and operations models--both simple analytical, and complex computational ones--are essential if we're going to do it right. Better modeling is also fun, as the math of electricity models is inherently interesting and revealing…
Find out more »Model-X knockoffs for controlled variable selection in high dimensional nonlinear regression
Lucas Janson (Harvard University )
E18-304
Abstract: Many contemporary large-scale applications, from genomics to advertising, involve linking a response of interest to a large set of potential explanatory variables in a nonlinear fashion, such as when the response is binary. Although this modeling problem has been extensively studied, it remains unclear how to effectively select important variables while controlling the fraction of false discoveries, even in high-dimensional logistic regression, not to mention general high-dimensional nonlinear models. To address such a practical problem, we propose a new…
Find out more »Abbas El Gamal
Abbas El Gamal (Stanford University)
32-141
LIDS Seminar Series Speaker: Abbas El Gamal Affiliation: Stanford University ____________________________________ The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »