Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

Friday, November 19, 3pm
A talk by Nisheeth Vishnoi, Yale University

Monday, November 22, 5pm
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

Drawn from Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the lecture will discuss how Professor Hazel Carby employed the insights of Stuart Hall into the nature of identities “as stories we tell ourselves,” and systems of recognition that we adopt, to trace the role of visual culture in the creation of British imperial subjects and subjectivity.

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

Understanding the Nature of Inference: Correlation and Causation Colloquium Series

There has been an enormous burgeoning of interest in causation across the sciences. One can open up a journal in microbiology and be assailed with detailed models of  the causal structure of cells and proteins. One can find textbooks on the increasing array of computational tools for causal search and discovery and take classes devoted to formal methods in causal modeling. Psychologists are unraveling new details about how people use causal concepts in reasoning.

While details of these kinds are in abundant supply, it remains a contested question what causation is and how it fits into a physics-based ontology.

In this talk, Professor Ismael will assemble the pieces of emerging scientific understanding of causation into an account of where (and how) causation arises in the architecture of the cosmos, with special attention to the contested questions of where the direction of causation comes from and its relationship agency.

Saturday, September 25
Moderated conversation with James Woodward, University of Pittsburgh

Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, John Templeton Foundation
Registration link for both events
Poster

Tuesday, May 25
Understanding the Nature of Inference: Correlation and Causation Colloquium Series
James Weatherall, University of California at Irvine
Why Do Groups Polarize over Matters of Fact? What Models Can and Cannot Tell Us
3 pm, Zoom EST
Wednesday, May 26
Moderated conversation with Kevin Dorst, University of Pittsburgh
3 pm, Zoom EST

One striking feature of the current political environment in the United States and elsewhere is that there are large groups with divergent beliefs about matters of fact, including ones where there is a rich and widely accessible body of scientific evidence available that clearly favors one side. This talk will draw on recent modeling work to provide three distinct possible explanations of this polarization in belief, each of which invokes different mechanisms and recommends different remedies. Professor Weatherall will conclude with a discussion of what it means, from the perspective of the epistemology of model-based science, that such different models can produce such similar outcomes. The moral will be to caution against overly simplistic explanations of and silver bullet solutions to our current quandary in political epistemology.
Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities and John Templeton Foundation

Registration link
Poster

Understanding the Nature of Inference: Correlation and Causation Colloquium Series
Nihat Ay, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Nihat Ay will provide an introduction to the field of causal networks. He will focus on instructive simple examples in order to highlight the core conceptual and philosophical ideas that underlie the theory. This approach provides a clear semantics that allows us to distinguish between causation and correlation. It also allows us to study how cause-effect relations give rise to particular kinds of correlations, which can then be exploited for inferring causal relations from correlations. However, this kind of inference, which is based on observations only, turns out to be rather limited. In addition to observing a system, one can also apply experimental interventions and thereby reveal causal structures that would not follow from correlational information.  This is one instance of system identification through experimental perturbations. He will conclude his presentation with an extension of the interventional calculus by a “knockout calculus” which is based on a kind of structural intervention. This allows us to reveal a more fine-grained causal description of the underlying system.    

Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, John Templeton Foundation
Registration Link
Poster

3:00 pm, Zoom EST