November 2020
LIDS Seminar – Mary Wootters (Stanford)
Mary Wootters (Stanford)
Online
TBD Bio: ******************************************** 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 »Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment
TBD
online
Does the consumption of ideologically congruent news on social media exacerbate polarization? Do political leanings of news outlets affect political opinions? Join us for this post-election special where Ro’ee Levy, Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Department of Economics, will talk about his work on estimating the effects of social media news exposure on polarization. TPP's Research to Policy Engagement Initiative aims to to create a community of researchers who can learn, apply, and contribute to developing best practices in bridging knowledge to action on societal challenges, across…
Find out more »Mobility Forum: Mobility services without carbon emissions
Jessika Trancik
online
To build a dynamic community among the mobility and transportation researchers, the MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is organizing the “Mobility Forum: Frontier of Mobility Research,” a weekly seminar series showcasing the MIT scholarship. Register for Zoom info.
Find out more »Valid hypothesis testing after hierarchical clustering
Daniela Witten (University of Washington)
online
Abstract: As datasets continue to grow in size, in many settings the focus of data collection has shifted away from testing pre-specified hypotheses, and towards hypothesis generation. Researchers are often interested in performing an exploratory data analysis in order to generate hypotheses, and then testing those hypotheses on the same data; I will refer to this as ‘double dipping’. Unfortunately, double dipping can lead to highly-inflated Type 1 errors. In this talk, I will consider the special case of hierarchical…
Find out more »Antitrust in the Digital Era – Platforms
Dr. Alexandra von Westernhagen
Online
Access via Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/3980544883 There is no denial that antitrust policy is at a crossroads. The emergence of online platforms as quasi-monopolies with wide reach into vertically integrated markets, the strategic importance of data to gain competitive advantages as well as mergers and acquisitions in the digital field have led to a re-think about the application of antirust rules in the US, Europe and other jurisdictions around the world. More recently issues related to the content of information under Rule…
Find out more »Personalized Federated Learning: A Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning Approach
Alireza Fallah (LIDS)
Online
ABSTRACT In Federated Learning, we aim to train models across multiple computing units (users), while users can only communicate with a common central server, without exchanging their data samples. This mechanism exploits the computational power of all users and allows users to obtain a richer model as their models are trained over a larger set of data points. However, this scheme only develops a common output for all the users, and, therefore, it does not adopt the model to each…
Find out more »SES PhD Admissions Q&A
Fotini Christia, Munther Dahleh (IDSS)
online
Learn about the Social and Engineering Systems Doctoral Program. Q&As are hosted by a member of the IDSS faculty. This live Q&A is a follow-up session for the pre-recorded SES Admissions Webinar which should be viewed prior to attending the Q&A. Sign-up by 3 November, 12PM EST to receive an email invitation to the Q&A.
Find out more »Digital Technology Integration
Sandy Pentland (IDSS)
Online
Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) this fall for our second digital transformation webinar series. In this series, we will continue to explore key digital transformation topics of corporate interest, including digital strategies, operational agility, customer experience, and new technologies.
Find out more »An Introduction to Proximal Causal Learning
Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen (University of Pennsylvania)
online
Please join us on November 2, 2020 at 4pm for the Distinguished Speaker Seminar with Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen, Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor and Professor of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Find out more »October 2020
Regulating Algorithmic Filtering on Social Media
Sarah Cen (LIDS)
Online
ABSTRACT Social media platforms moderate content using a process known as algorithmic filtering (AF). While AF has the potential to greatly improve the user experience, it has also drawn intense scrutiny for its roles in, for example, spreading fake news, amplifying hate speech, and facilitating digital red-lining. However, regulating AF can be harmful to the social media ecosystem by interfering with personalization, lowering profits, and restricting free speech. We are interested in whether or not it is possible to design…
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