Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

Mapping as Knowing Lecture Series
Kim Stanley Robinson, acclaimed science fiction writer
(Franke Program in Science and the Humanities)

Predicting the future is impossible, but modeling possible futures is important. Now, all realistic futures for civilization include some climate change, which means biosphere damage that could range from the bad to the terrible. How then do we talk about the future without creating in our current selves various versions of giving up? And what do humans need to do now to bring the least bad futures into being?
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Poster

Social and Structural Contours of Marginalization in the Context of COVID-19
The Wisdom Project was born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of persons with lived experience with mental health problems has produced a series of webinars and podcasts; and they have conducted research on how we can collectively make sense of this global disruption. This pandemic—far from being a great equalizer—has brought to the fore issues that are at the core of our societies and that we can no longer ignore—systemic racism, oppression, poverty, and health inequities. This talk will focus on a series of regional conversations that invited the voices and experiences of those who have experienced first-hand what it’s like to survive precarious livelihoods, racism, oppression, marginalization, stigma, and other unfreedoms.

We look forward to hosting this talk by former Franke Postdoctoral Fellow Ana Florence, now affiliated with Columbia University.

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Poster

Distinguished speaker series

In Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer explores the nature of life and investigates why scientists have struggled to draw its boundaries. He handles pythons, goes spelunking to visit hibernating bats, and even tries his hand at evolution. Zimmer visits scientists making miniature human brains to ask when life begins and follows a voyage that delivered microscopic animals to the moon, where they now exist in a state between life and death. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer demonstrates that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest triumph: a full theory of life.

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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

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