Data Matters is the weekly seminar series of the Data Science Initiative. Talks are held Wednesdays during the academic year, 4–5:30 pm, at 164 Angell Street, 3rd floor.

The Data Science Initiative includes scholars with backgrounds in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences. Data Matters is intended to stimulate conversations and collaboration by bringing multiple perspectives to challenging data-driven problems and talks are structured to be more of an interactive experience than traditional academic seminars. The format is generally a 25-30 minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of interaction with the audience, mediated by a discussant.

 

The Data of Democracy

 

Moon Duchin

Professor of Mathematics, Tufts University

The US Census Bureau provides a remarkable set of data products that give us a rich picture of the nation. It’s the raw material for an enormous range of research questions and practices of government. In this talk, I will tell stories of how the data is made and how the data is deployed, with particular attention to how we see and count race in America.

 

This talk will be followed by a panel discussion with:

Suresh Venkatasubramanian

Professor of Data Science and Computer Science, Brown University

Philip Klein

Professor of Computer Science, Brown University

John Marion

Executive Director, Common Cause Rhode Island

 

Moon Duchin received her BA in Mathematics and Women’s Studies from Harvard University in 1998 and moved on to the University of Chicago where she completed her Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2005. Since 2016, Moon Duchin has been deeply involved in studying the mathematics of redistricting. She founded the MGGG Redistricting Lab which grew out of an informal collective called the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group and is based at the Tisch College of Civic Life. It includes expertise in geometry, modeling and computation, graph algorithms, geography, policy, law, and civics, and brings techniques like Markov chains to the study of fair redistricting, but always in conversation with real-world applications. At Tufts, Moon was one of the faculty who founded the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society program, and a large portion of her work crosses over in an STS direction. She likes to think about the social foundations of authority, technology and law, and about mathematical interventions for racial justice.

Thank you for registering for the Advance-CTR REDCap Features, Tips, & Tricks Virtual Workshop with Jeff Richardson.

The virtual workshop will be on Thursday, April 6, 2023 from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST. This workshop will provide an overview of helpful REDCap tools, features, and tricks to consider when using REDCap. Jeff Richardson will also provide general advice and suggestions on ways to optimize your REDCap.

If you have any questions contact [email protected]

Introductory videos can be found here: https://projectredcap.org/resources/videos/

Previous REDCap Workshop recordings can be found on the Advance-CTR website: https://advancectr.brown.edu/events-training/event-recordings

 

Data Science, Computation, and Visualization (DSCOV) Workshops

Fridays at noon

These are one-hour skills-focused workshops, designed to be hands-on, so bring a laptop if you can. They are open to anyone, and any pre-requisite knowledge or resources will be announced beforehand.

Pizza will be available. Please RSVP below if you plan to attend in person.

 

April 7, 2023:

Modern Python Project Development

Presenter:

Paul Xu, Data Scientist (OIT)

Prerequisites:

Some experience with Python and Git required

Target Audience:

Python users developing packages; anyone who wants to learn more about tools like poetry, precommit, and GitHub actions

The Advance-CTR Distinguished Clinical and Translational Research Seminar Series showcases clinical and translational research from across Rhode Island. This series features outstanding science from expert investigators across the translational spectrum. Seminars are held virtually on the second Thursday of each month.

Thursday, April 13, 2023:

Kimberly Arcoleo, PhD, MPH: “School-based Asthma Therapy (SBAT) to Reduce Disparities in Childhood Asthma: Pragmatic Process and Program Implementation Evaluation”

Kimberly Arcoleo, PhD, MPH is a health services researcher who earned her Master’s in Public Health and doctorate in Health Services Research from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She completed a two-year fellowship in Health Disparities Research at Arizona State University’s Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center where she gained critical knowledge of the role of culture and acculturation in health and healthcare decision-making. The overarching, long-term objective of Dr. Arcoleo’s program of research is to optimize ethnic minority and underserved children’s asthma health outcomes through evidence-based interventions at the child, family, school, and healthcare system levels with a focus on the role of culture in the healthcare, comorbidities, medical adherence, asthma education and case management. Dr. Arcoleo has extensive experience designing, implementing, and managing large-scale, longitudinal randomized, controlled, intervention studies in the home, school, and clinical settings. She has expertise in research design and methods, complex statistical analysis, comparative effectiveness research and analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis and regularly provides training and mentoring for graduate students in tenure-track faculty in these areas. She currently is Principal Investigator on a $2.27 million NIH-funded R01 grant to evaluate a program that she has been working on with her clinical collaborators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, titled “School-Based Asthma Therapy (SBAT) to Reduce Disparities in Childhood Asthma: Pragmatic Process and Program Implementation Evaluation.”

“First-person writers,” says author Meghan O’Gieblyn, “have always called upon metaphorical language to describe their interior worlds. But as our metaphors for consciousness grow increasingly technological — as we come to see our brains as hardware, and our minds as software — these interior worlds have come to seem less reliable, premised as they are on what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called the myth of ‘privileged access.’ Our conception of our inner lives is also changing due to current debates about consciousness and the emergence of advanced technologies. At a moment when algorithms are learning to write sonnets and online political discourse has been infiltrated by bots, the ability to believe in the interior lives of others (and of ourselves) is becoming more fraught and requires, at times, a leap of faith.”

Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning (Doubleday, 2021) and Interior States (Anchor, 2018), which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, n+1, The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2017 (Mariner) and The Contemporary American Essay (Anchor, 2021). She also writes the “Cloud Support” advice column for Wired.

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact [email protected] or (401) 863-6070.

This event is a part of the Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series, which brings high-profile speakers in the humanities to the Brown University campus. Each visit includes a public lecture and a separate seminar-style meeting with undergraduate students. Brown University undergraduate students and faculty members can nominate future speakers.