CSDE hosted its first open house on May 5.  CSDE staff enjoyed meeting affiliates and trainees. Everyone enjoyed the refreshments. In preparing for the event, we developed new brochures outlining CSDE services for sharing with visitors.  You can download a brochure about the following: All Services Brochure Spring 2023; Biodemography Lab Services Brochure Spring 2023; Development Core Services Spring 2023; Managing and Accessing Secure Data Brochure Spring 2023; and, Training Program and Services Brochure.  For a glimpse of a few pictures from the event (and what you missed!)

Join CSDE as we host Dr. Sarah E. Myhre for her talk “The Role of Academic Research in the Pursuit of Accountability for Climate Damages” on May 19th! Dr. Sarah E. Myhre is a climate and environmental scientist turned philanthropic professional. Her work sits at the intersection of legal scholarship, scientific advancements, and political power. She is a fifth generation Washingtonian. She received her B.S. from Western Washington University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis. Her talk will speak to the pursuit of compensation for material damages due to climate change is an emergent area of corporate accountability law. More broadly, national and international law is building strength and force to address climate accountably: this legal movement is supported by an evidentiary basis that is built by academic researchers. This talk will examine the role that social and physical scientists can play in supporting the fair and equal application of these laws. We will discuss fraudulent action by oil and gas corporations, the consequences for communities and municipalities, and the potential opportunities for repair and repatriation.

Join CSDE as we host Dr. Sarah E. Myhre for her talk “The Role of Academic Research in the Pursuit of Accountability for Climate Damages” on May 19th! Dr. Sarah E. Myhre is a climate and environmental scientist turned philanthropic professional. Her work sits at the intersection of legal scholarship, scientific advancements, and political power. She is a fifth generation Washingtonian. She received her B.S. from Western Washington University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis. Her talk will speak to the pursuit of compensation for material damages due to climate change is an emergent area of corporate accountability law. More broadly, national and international law is building strength and force to address climate accountably: this legal movement is supported by an evidentiary basis that is built by academic researchers. This talk will examine the role that social and physical scientists can play in supporting the fair and equal application of these laws. We will discuss fraudulent action by oil and gas corporations, the consequences for communities and municipalities, and the potential opportunities for repair and repatriation.

Please join the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences for their next speaker in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series. On Wednesday, May 17 at 12:30 pm, Isaiah Andrews, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, will give a seminar titled, “Inference on Winners.”

This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.

Abstract:

Many empirical questions concern target parameters selected through optimization. For example, researchers may be interested in the effectiveness of the best policy found in a randomized trial, or the best-performing investment strategy based on historical data. Such settings give rise to a winner’s curse, where conventional estimates are biased and conventional confidence intervals are unreliable. This paper develops optimal confidence intervals and median-unbiased estimators that are valid conditional on the target selected and so overcome this winner’s curse. If one requires validity only on average over targets that might have been selected, we develop hybrid procedures that combine conditional and projection confidence intervals to offer further performance gains relative to existing alternatives.

This seminar will be located at 409 Savery Hall

To join by Zoom, please use the information below.

https://washington.zoom.us/j/91889204671

Please join the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences for their next speaker in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series. On Wednesday, May 17 at 12:30 pm, Isaiah Andrews, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, will give a seminar titled, “Inference on Winners.”

This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.

Abstract:

Many empirical questions concern target parameters selected through optimization. For example, researchers may be interested in the effectiveness of the best policy found in a randomized trial, or the best-performing investment strategy based on historical data. Such settings give rise to a winner’s curse, where conventional estimates are biased and conventional confidence intervals are unreliable. This paper develops optimal confidence intervals and median-unbiased estimators that are valid conditional on the target selected and so overcome this winner’s curse. If one requires validity only on average over targets that might have been selected, we develop hybrid procedures that combine conditional and projection confidence intervals to offer further performance gains relative to existing alternatives.

This seminar will be located at 409 Savery Hall

To join by Zoom, please use the information below.

https://washington.zoom.us/j/91889204671

On May 17 @4:30pm CSDE Affiiliate Abraham Flaxman will be presenting to the eScience Institute on work his team has been doing to generate pseudo populations – “Introducing pseudopeople: Census-scale simulated data for entity resolution.” The talk will introduce and demo pseudopeople, our new, publicly available Python package that we hope you will use in entity resolution research and development. pseudopeople generates census-scale, simulated population data with adjustable parameters, to replicate key complexities from real challenges in record linkage work. Typical applications of entity resolution and record linkage rely on sensitive and confidential data, and this can be a barrier to reproducible computational research and sometimes even to open communication about innovations and challenges. The value hypothesis of this work is that creating realistic, simulated data (that includes non-confidential simulated versions of sensitive fields, like name, address, and date of birth) will enable more research in census-scale entity resolution and guide the research towards challenges that Census Bureau faces in practice.