Presentations

This talk is based on this paper, by me, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts, along with a brief summary of our previous work. Here's an abstract: The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that...

The spectacular progress the media describes as "big data" has little to do with the data.  Data, after all, is becoming commoditized, less expensive, and an automatic byproduct of other changes in organizations and society. More data alone doesn't generate insights; it often merely makes data analysis harder. The real revolution isn't about the data, it is about the stunning progress in the statistical and other methods of extracting insights from the data. We illustrate these points with a wide range of examples from ...

Perusall is a new collaborative e­book platform that keeps students on track before class. Perusall ensures students learn more, get instant answers to their questions, come to class prepared (with >90% having done the reading), and enjoy the experience. It enables instructors to teach more effectively, understand student misconceptions, structure class discussion, and save time. Perusall is free. For publishers and authors, it is the ultimate solution to IP piracy, resales, and sell-through. Perusall is based on extensive patent-­...

The accuracy of U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) demographic and financial forecasts is crucial for the solvency of its Trust Funds, government programs comprising greater than 50% of all federal government expenditures, industry decision making, and the evidence base of many scholarly articles. Forecasts are also essential for scoring policy proposals put forward by both political parties or anyone else. Because SSA makes public little replication information, and uses ad hoc, qualitative, and antiquated statistical forecasting methods, no one in or out of government has...