[Colloquium] REMINDER: Gary King (Harvard), November 8th

[Rob Mitchum]

This Friday, the Center for Data and Computing Distinguished Speaker Series
will host Gary King <https://gking.harvard.edu/>, Weatherhead University
Professor at Harvard University, Director of the Institute for Quantitative
Social Science <https://www.iq.harvard.edu/>, and co-founder of Social
Science One <https://socialscience.one/>.

If you plan to attend either his talk at 12:30 pm (JCL 390) or his student
roundtable at 11am (JCL 011), *please RSVP today
<https://www.eventbrite.com/o/center-for-data-and-computing-cdac-20002661312>*
so we can order enough food and prepare enough space.

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[image: CDAC] <https://cdac.uchicago.edu/> [image: Announcement]

*Please join us November 8th as we continue our Fall Distinguished Speaker
Series <http://cdac.uchicago.edu/events> with Gary King, Weatherhead
University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Institute
for Quantitative Social Science <https://www.iq.harvard.edu/>.*
CDAC DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES Statistically Valid Inferences from
Privacy Protected DataFriday, November 8, 2019 · 12:30-1:30pm
Room 390, John Crerar Library Building, 5730 S. Ellis Avenue

For academic researchers to access data collected by private industry,
balancing opposing interests is insufficient; we must instead use
technology to solve political problems and make balancing unnecessary. We
describe how this was accomplished with Facebook data by adapting
innovations in constitutional design. To make data available more
generally, we then propose a general-purpose data access and analysis
system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for individuals who may be
represented in the data and statistical guarantees for researchers
analyzing it. We build on the standard of “differential privacy” but,
unlike most such approaches, we also correct for the serious statistical
biases induced by privacy-preserving procedures, provide a proper
accounting for statistical uncertainty, and impose minimal constraints on
the choice of data analytic methods and types of quantities that can be
estimated. Just as data providers need differential privacy to protect
individuals, they need inferential validity to protect individuals and
society from fallacious scientific conclusions. We emphasize throughout
ease of implementation and use, and high levels of computational
efficiency. We also offer open source software that demonstrates how to
implement all our methods. Based on joint work with Georgina Evans,
Margaret Schwenzfeier, and Abhradeep Thakurta.

King will also host a student roundtable in Crerar Room 011 on Friday,
November 8th, at 11:00 a.m. We expect a capacity crowd for both events, so
RSVP is required.
RSVP For Both Events Here
<https://www.eventbrite.com/o/center-for-data-and-computing-cdac-20002661312>
*Gary King*
Weatherhead University Professor, Harvard University
Director, Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard
University -- one of 25 with Harvard's most distinguished faculty title --
and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. King develops
and applies empirical methods in many areas of social science, focusing on
innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical
application.

King is an elected Fellow in 8 honorary societies (National Academy of
Sciences, American Statistical Association, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society for
Political Methodology, National Academy of Social Insurance, American
Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation) and
has won more than 55 prizes and awards for his work. King was elected
President of the Society for Political Methodology and Vice President of
the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the
Senior Editorial Board at Science, Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and Senior
Science Adviser to the World Health Organization. He has written more than
170 journal articles, 20 open source software packages, and 8 books.

King originally proposed the now widely accepted standard for fairness in
legislative redistricting known as "partisan symmetry," and the methods
used by courts and parties to detect when partisan gerrymandering violates
it. His “ecological inference” methods for inferring individual behavior
from aggregate data are used in most jurisdictions applying the Voting
Rights Act to detect racial gerrymandering. His book with Keohane and
Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, helped launch the modern subfield of
qualitative methods in political science; his book Unifying Political
Methodology had a similar role for quantitative political methodology. His
“Replication, Replication” article initiated the data sharing movement in
political science, and his ongoing international “Dataverse” project
supports the movement across fields. His “anchoring vignettes” approach to
cross-cultural survey comparability has been used in more than 100
countries by researchers, governments, and others. King pioneers
“politically robust” research designs that make possible unusually large
randomized experiments in politically difficult circumstances -- including
the largest ever randomized health policy experiment, to evaluate the
Mexican universal health insurance program, and the only large scale
randomized news media experiment. He has reverse engineered Chinese
censorship and fabrication of social media posts, improved Social Security
Trust Fund forecasts, and developed empirical methods and software widely
used in academia, government, and private industry for automated text
analysis, rare events, missing data, measurement error, causal inference,
interpreting statistical results, and for forecasting elections, mortality
rates, and international conflict.

King's work is widely read across scholarly fields and beyond academia. He
was listed as the most cited political scientist of his cohort; among the
group of "political scientists who have made the most important theoretical
contributions" to the discipline "from its beginnings in the late-19th
century to the present"; and on lists of the most highly cited researchers
across the social sciences. King’s many former students and postdocs now
hold positions at leading universities and companies around the world. He
has collaborated with more than 250 scholars, including many of his
students, on research for publication. He has served on more than 30
editorial, nonprofit, and corporate boards; as founding editor of The
Political Methodologist, and on the governing councils of the American
Political Science Association, Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research, Society for Political Methodology, Midwest Political
Science Association, Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, and the Institute for Data, Science, and Society.

King is also an experienced entrepreneur. He is co-founder and an inventor
of the original technology for Crimson Hexagon (merged with Brandwatch),
Learning Catalytics (acquired by Pearson), Perusall, Thresher, OpenScholar,
and other firms. He has received 12 patents for these technologies.

King received a B.A. from SUNY New Paltz (1980) and a Ph.D. from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984). He taught at NYU for three years
before coming to Harvard in 1987. His research has been supported by the
National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
World Health Organization, Sloan Foundation, National Institute of Aging,
Gates Foundation, Library of Congress, Global Forum for Health Research,
and other centers, corporations, foundations, and federal agencies.
[image: CDAC UChicago]

CDAC is the incubator for new multidisciplinary data science and artificial
intelligence research at the University of Chicago. We catalyze new
discoveries by fusing fundamental and applied research with real-world
applications.


-- 
*Rob Mitchum*

*Associate Director of Communications for Data Science and Computing*
*University of Chicago*
*rmitchum at uchicago.edu <rmitchum at ci.uchicago.edu>*
*773-484-9890*
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