CSC Workshop: Computing Across Disciplines

Welcome back!

We're kicking off our workshop series for the year with an exciting introductory workshop featuring three folks working in Computer Science. Each presenter will give 30 to 45 minute overviews of how they use and apply computing to topics across disciplines.

Presenters and topics include:

Algorithmic Fairness and its Applications to Law and Policy, Emily Black, Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ Barnard College

Prof. Black is new faculty at Barnard and her research is about algorithmic fairness and machine learning (ML). This presentation gives a brief overview of what algorithmic fairness is and then describes Prof. Black's current project, which is to highlight recent research showing how there are many interchangeable ML models for every prediction task. Namely, this work shows that are several easily-discoverable models with similar accuracy, but different levels of discrimination across demographic groups, and showing how to translate this research into proposed updates to anti-discrimination law (the disparate impact standard). 

Monte Carlo Methods for Reconstructing Jet Structures in Particle Physics, Antonio Moretti, Roman Fellow in Computer Science @ Barnard College

This presentation discusses the use of Monte Carlo methods in analyzing data generated by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Learning About Database Applications, Ramya Subramanian, BC ' 26, majoring in Computer Science and Economics

Ramya will give an overview of a project she's working on with Columbia University faculty, which is developing an open-source suite of cyberinfrastructure tools, called the Decision Engine for Socioeconomic Disaster Risk (DESDR), to fill data voids by collecting and cleaning disaster risk data directly from affected populations from natural disasters. Learn how the DESDR model incorporates databases through Typescript, Svelte, and DBT. This application is useful because it is a reproducible model that allows farmers to input their own data files and create an interactive model to view insurance payouts and other such charts.

This workshop is planned to take place in person (516 Milstein) and online. A link to join via Zoom will be sent to registrants shortly before the event.

We look forward to seeing you there!

For more information about the Barnard CSC, go to https://www.csc.barnard.edu or follow us on Instagram and Twitter (@barnard_csc).