Presentations

To deter gerrymandering, many state constitutions require legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that compactness has multiple dimensions and have generated many conflicting measures. We hypothesize that both are correct -- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey to elicit this understanding, with high reliability (in data where...

Social scientists can understand and ameliorate some of the major challenges of human society by making new connections across academia, government, and industry; developing new methods of analyzing data, rather than merely watching big data get bigger; and ensuring they have the flexibility to ask new questions that arise in data analysis rather than sticking to the original ones posed. I make these points in discussions of research projects I've been lucky to lead across the US, China, Mexico, and Italy.  

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Unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of worries about privacy violations. We address this problem with a general-purpose data access and analysis system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for individuals who may be represented in the data, statistical guarantees for researchers seeking insights from it, and protection for society from some fallacious scientific conclusions. We build on the standard...