Protecting Individual-Level Census Data with Differential Privacy
The power of finely-grained, individual-level data comes with a drawback: it compromises the privacy of potentially anyone and everyone in the dataset. Even for de-identified datasets, there can be wa...
18 Maj 202021min
Causal Trees
What do you get when you combine the causal inference needs of econometrics with the data-driven methodology of machine learning? Usually these two don’t go well together (deriving causal conclusions ...
11 Maj 202015min
The Grammar Of Graphics
You may not realize it consciously, but beautiful visualizations have rules. The rules are often implict and manifest themselves as expectations about how the data is summarized, presented, and annota...
4 Maj 202035min
Gaussian Processes
It’s pretty common to fit a function to a dataset when you’re a data scientist. But in many cases, it’s not clear what kind of function might be most appropriate—linear? quadratic? sinusoidal? some co...
27 Apr 202020min
Keeping ourselves honest when we work with observational healthcare data
The abundance of data in healthcare, and the value we could capture from structuring and analyzing that data, is a huge opportunity. It also presents huge challenges. One of the biggest challenges is ...
20 Apr 202019min
Changing our formulation of AI to avoid runaway risks: Interview with Prof. Stuart Russell
AI is evolving incredibly quickly, and thinking now about where it might go next (and how we as a species and a society should be prepared) is critical. Professor Stuart Russell, an AI expert at UC Be...
13 Apr 202028min
Putting machine learning into a database
Most data scientists bounce back and forth regularly between doing analysis in databases using SQL and building and deploying machine learning pipelines in R or python. But if we think ahead a few yea...
6 Apr 202024min
The work-from-home episode
Many of us have the privilege of working from home right now, in an effort to keep ourselves and our family safe and slow the transmission of covid-19. But working from home is an adjustment for many ...
29 Mars 202029min
