Presentations

Breaking down classroom walls and setting learning free, at Lecture Breakers Virtual Summer Conference, Tuesday, June 4, 2024

The rapid transition to online teaching necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic has been a good opportunity to rethink my approach to teaching. Moving online laid bare the restrictions imposed by both traditional classrooms and online teaching, and demonstrated that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be improved by making them asynchronous and self-paced in any teaching modality. What may have...

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Time: Physics, Film, History, at Nauenberg History of Science Lecture | UC Santa Cruz, Thursday, April 18, 2024
Henri Poincaré's and Albert Einstein's reformulation of simultaneity was long seen as a development from imaginative thought experiments. But the all-too-material and the most abstract notions of time cross in essential ways (Swiss Patent Office, Paris Bureau of Longitude). Galison explores this intersection in collaboration with the artist William Kentridge (“The Refusal of Time,” 2012), pushing history, physics, and philosophy into a more associative-imaginative register.Henri PoincaréFrom there, Galison turns to the 10,000 year struggle to contain radioactive materials—a duration twice... Read more about Time: Physics, Film, History
Connor Jerzak presents "Selecting Optimal Candidate Profiles in Adversarial Environments Using Conjoint Analysis" Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Abstract: Conjoint analysis, an application of factorial experimental design, is a popular tool in social science research for studying multidimensional preferences.  In such experiments in the political analysis context, respondents are asked to choose between two hypothetical political candidates with randomly selected features, which can include partisanship, policy positions, gender and race.  We consider the problem of identifying optimal candidate profiles. Because the number of unique feature combinations far exceeds the total number of observations in a typical conjoint... Read more about Connor Jerzak presents "Selecting Optimal Candidate Profiles in Adversarial Environments Using Conjoint Analysis"
Melissa Dell presents “Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History” Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Abtract: Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) – which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder.... Read more about Melissa Dell presents “Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History”
Contested Visibilities of the Anthropocene (Keynote), at Forms of Environmentalization | Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Friday, April 5, 2024

Our current climate condition sets us in a great conundrum. On the one side, ocean rise, desertification, and extreme weather events are upending the well-being and economic fortunes of millions. On the other side, we have few means to convey the causes of climate change in visceral ways, widely graspable. In this talk I will report on joint work with the art historian, Caroline Jones, on our study of moving and still images that have broken through, altering public opinion and national policy, with examples from land, sea, and air.  At the same...

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Zeyang Yu presents "A Binary IV Model for Persuasion: Profiling Persuasion Types among Compliers."  Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Abstract: In the empirical study of persuasion, researchers often use a binary instrument to encourage individuals to consume information and take some action. We show that with the Imbens-Angrist instrumental variable model assumptions and the monotone treatment response assumption, it is possible to identify the joint distributions of potential outcomes among compliers. This is necessary to identify the percentage of persuaded individuals and their statistical characteristics. Specifically, we develop a weighting method that helps researchers identify the statistical...

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Shuangning Li presents "Experimenting under Stochastic Congestion" Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Abstract: We study randomized experiments in a service system when stochastic congestion can arise from temporarily limited supply and/or demand. Such congestion gives rise to cross-unit interference between the waiting customers, and analytic strategies that do not account for this interference may be biased. In current practice, one of the most widely used ways to address stochastic congestion is to use switchback experiments that alternatively turn a target intervention on and off for the whole system. We find, however, that under a queueing model for stochastic congestion, the... Read more about Shuangning Li presents "Experimenting under Stochastic Congestion"
Designing questions for student-centered learning, at AMISA 2024 Educators' Conference, American School of Asuncion, Asuncion, Paraguay, Thursday, March 21, 2024:
3._question_workshop.pdf

Questions are the heart of evaluating and engaging students. In this workshop, we will work individually and in pairs on a case study to learn best practices for developing effective questions.

After participating in this workshop, participants will be able to
  • Evaluate questions and classify them according the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy
  • Revise questions to increase the level of Bloom’s taxonomy at which they engage students
  • Develop questions that more effectively engage students in a flipped-learning environment
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