Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

Distinguished Speaker Series
The movement of large groups of animals—such as flocks of birds or schooling of fish—often appears harmonic and soothing to the eye, almost as if animal collectives were dancing to some musical rules not visible to the human eye. Yet at the same time, the sound of the natural world is increasingly shaped by the timber of the drums of human activities and habitat destruction across the world. In this talk, Ellis-Soto combines new cutting-edge technology, with biological principles and musical theory to take a dive into representing the lives of animal collectives through art and music. From music on a farm, art exhibitions, up to involving of local youth, we invite you to take the plunge into the sounds of animal collectives and ecosystems.

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Poster

In June 2009, a young American scaled the walls of the British Museum of Natural History, broke out a window, climbed inside, and stole a million dollars’ worth of dead birds—scientific specimens preserved over the centuries by a chain of curators who recognized that these birds held answers to questions that scientists hadn’t even considered. He stripped them of their tags (bearing information crucial to research) and then hacked them to bits with a scalpel, filling Ziploc bags with thousands of iridescent, glimmering feathers, which he sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cultish community of Victorian salmon fly-tiers. In The Feather Thief, Johnson descends into this “feather underground,” tracking down the missing birds across the world in a madcap quest for some kind of justice.

This American Life produced a special on the book with our guest; you may want to listen to it here in advance of what promises to be a great talk.

Sponsored by Franke Program in Science and the Humanities
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Poster

Mariano Sigman is one of the most outstanding neuroscientists in the world, with over 150 publications in the most prestigious scientific journals. He is also passionate about experimentation and has worked with magicians, chess masters, musicians, athletes, and visual artists to bring his knowledge of neuroscience to different aspects of human culture and apply it in different contexts. In his conferences, he teaches how the mind works and what lessons we can learn about decision making, leadership, team management, personal development, and creative skills; his presentations always achieve a high level of participation from the audience through experiments and games.

He obtained his degree in physics from the University of Buenos Aires, a PhD in neuroscience in New York; and he did post-doctoral work in cognitive science at the College de France (Paris). In 2016, he was awarded the Pio XI Medal, from the Pontifical Academy of Science, one of the most prestigious prizes in science (shared among others with Stephen Hawking, and several Nobel prize winners). He has also developed an extensive career in popularizing science, which includes TV programs and hundreds of articles published in different news outlets. He is also the author of the bestseller The Secret Life of the Mind.

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Bias in Algorithms

Moderated conversation with Aleksander Madry, Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing, MIT

Artificial algorithms are increasingly being deployed to inform, endorse, and govern various aspects of today’s society. Their reach includes the domains of hiring, lending, medicine, criminal justice, insurance, allocation of public services, social and business interactions, and the dissemination of information and news. Through a synthesis of computational and statistical models for representing concepts, human-generated datasets that provide examples for training, and powerful optimization algorithms that can efficiently navigate through vast and complex landscapes to infer concepts that explain data, such algorithms have taken big strides towards mimicking various aspects of natural intelligence. 

These algorithms have led to tremendous economic and social impact but have also been shown to be biased – they can discriminate, reinforce prejudices, polarize opinions, and influence political processes. How can subjective human or societal biases emerge in the objective world of artificial algorithms? And how can we design algorithms free from these limitations?

The search for answers to these questions also leads us to some understanding of the bias in human decision-making algorithms.

Register in advance for this webinar and the post-talk conversation
Poster

We are delighted that famed author and mathematician Jordan Ellenberg will be joining us for a virtual talk this semester.  In his words, our speaker wrote a book about geometry and found himself, surprisingly, constantly talking about poetry.  In this talk, he will cover various subjects, including Wordsworth’s friendship with the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton; Andrei Markov’s random walk through Eugene Onegin and the idea of mechanical language production; what geometry and poetry seem to look for in each other; and the vision of geometry expressed in the poem by Rita Dove, whence his talk title originates.

Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities Distinguished Speaker Series
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Poster