Data Skeptic

In this episode, Kyle interviews Laura Edell at MS Build 2019. The conversation covers a number of topics, notably her NCAA Final 4 prediction model.

Today, we are joined by Rajiv Movva, a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell Tech University. His research interest lies in the intersection of responsible AI and computational social science. He joins to discuss the findings of this work that analyzed LLM publication patterns.

He shared the dataset he used for the survey. He also discussed the conditions for determining the papers to analyze. Rajiv shared some of the trends he observed from his analysis. For one, he observed there has been an increase in LLMs research. He also shared the proportions of papers published by universities, organizations, and industry leaders in LLMs such as OpenAI and Google. He mentioned the majority of the papers are centered on the social impact of LLMs. He also discussed other exciting application of LLMs such as in education.

Becca Taylor joins us to discuss her work studying the impact of plastic bag bans as published in Bag Leakage: The Effect of Disposable Carryout Bag Regulations on Unregulated Bags from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. How does one measure the impact of these bans? Are they achieving their intended goals? Join us and find out!

Julia Evans joins us help answer the question why do neural networks think a panda is a vulture. Kyle talks to Julia about her hands-on work fooling neural networks.

Julia runs Wizard Zines which publishes works such as Your Linux Toolbox. You can find her on Twitter @b0rk

Jessica Hullman joins us to share her expertise on data visualization and communication of data in the media. We discuss Jessica’s work on visualizing uncertainty, interviewing visualization designers on why they don't visualize uncertainty, and modeling interactions with visualizations as Bayesian updates.

Homepage: http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jhullman/

Lab: MU Collective