Kansas, Delaware, and New Jersey are in the process of purchasing voting machines with a serious design flaw, and they should reconsider while there is still time! Over the past 15 years, almost all the states have moved away from paperless touchscreen voting systems (DREs) to optical-scan paper ballots. They’ve done so because if a […]
Privacy, ethics, and data access: A case study of the Fragile Families Challenge
September 14, 2018 by
This blog post summarizes a paper describing the privacy and ethics process by which we organized the Fragile Families Challenge. The paper will appear in a special issue of the journal Socius. Academic researchers, companies, and governments holding data face a fundamental tension between risk to respondents and benefits to science. On one hand, these […]
Securing the Vote — National Academies report
September 11, 2018 by
In this November’s election, could a computer hacker, foreign or domestic, alter votes (in the voting machine) or prevent people from voting (by altering voter registrations)? What should we do to protect ourselves? The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have released a report, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy about the cybervulnerabilities in U.S. election […]
Why PhD experiences are so variable and what you can do about it
September 4, 2018 by
People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to do a PhD. Few career choices involve such a colossal time commitment, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether a PhD is right for you, […]
What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?
July 26, 2018 by
Machine learning is eating the world. The abundance of training data has helped ML achieve amazing results for object recognition, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and all manner of other tasks. Much of this training data is very sensitive, including personal photos, search queries, location traces, and health-care records. In a recent series of papers, […]
