Please reach out to the organizers at organizers@md4sg.com if you have any questions or suggestions for future colloquium speakers.
Upcoming Talks
Caterina Calsamiglia, Institute of Political Economy and Governance, Barcelona
Date: Friday, March 19th, 12:00-1:15 PM ET (6-7:15 PM CET/WAT)
Caterina Calsamiglia is an ICREA Research Professor at IPEG. She got her PhD from the Department of Economics at Yale University. Her research focuses on market design and public policy design with a particular interest in education. Her work includes theoretical, experimental and empirical analysis. In the recent years she has been leading a research initiative to help develop Pentabilities in life-long learning processes. To assist the Pentabilities initiative she co-founded Pentabilities app, a tool to track analyse the development of your pentabilities.
Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Date: April 16, 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM ET (5-6:15 PM CET/WAT)
Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University) and MSc; BSc in Electrical Engineering (Wits University). He is currently based at the University of Pretoria as the ABSA Chair of Data Science. He works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). As part of his vision for the ABSA Data Science chair, he is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area, he has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. He is an organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He is passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students and mentoring budding Data Scientists.
Maria Rodriguez, University at Buffalo
Date: May, TTBA
Dr. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo's School of Social Work (SUNY). She is also a faculty associate at the BerkmanKlein Center for Internet and Society, a faculty fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and a member of the Twitter Academic Research Advisory Board. Her research is at the intersection of applied demography, computational social science, and social policy. The first line of research examines the ethical implications of algorithmic decision-making in human services, child welfare in particular. The second line of research looks at the lived experience of marginalized communities as self-reported on social media. The through line between the two concerns the methods involved: she identifies as a methodologist in social work spaces, in as far as her substantive focus is how computational methods can support using large, unstructured data to scale social work interventions. For that reason Rodriguez founded the caretLAB, the first lab housed in a school of social work to her knowledge dedicated to computational research methods in the public interest. Her lab works with technologists across fields of inquiry to leverage cutting edge, innovative technologies to develop, implement, and evaluate scaled interventions.