Welcome back to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.

Alison Bashford – How Do We Think about Population in the Anthropocene?

  • Monday, April 4, 2022. 5 to 6 pm.
  • Online. Registration required.
  • “Allison Bashford explores how and why ‘population’ went from center-stage to off-stage”…“After and in the light of [modern historical] impact[s], she asks how or whether ‘population’ might productively be considered via a ‘postcritique’ humanities and social sciences, not least bringing historians into that conversation.” Learn more here.

Computer Science Seminar: Omolola Ogunyemi (Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science)

  • Tuesday, April 5, 2022. 5 to 6 pm.
  • Online. Registration required.
  • “This talk will describe the approach taken to address [Diabetic retinopathy] in a medically underserved area (South Los Angeles) by researchers in the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, using telehealth and machine learning on data from patient electronic health records.” Learn more here.

Diversity in Computing: Matt Mitchell (CryptoHarlem & Ford Foundation) on Easy Fixes for Algorithmic Bias

  • Tuesday, April 5, 2022. 6 to 7 pm.
  • Online. Registration required,
  • Matt Mitchell, “hacker, founder CryptoHarlem, and tech fellow to the build program at the Ford Foundation” discusses “one of the most impactful and concrete solutions to algorithmic bias is having a diverse team of researchers, analysts, critics, to conduct the work. This is something that is quickly glanced over but in this conversation we will focus on this inconvenient truth.” Learn more here.

Governing the Climate? The Paris Agreement at Work

  • Wednesday, April 6, 2022. 8 to 9:30 am.
  • Online. Registration required. 
  • “How can very ambitious emissions reduction goals be met by voluntary national commitments? Do commitments translate into transformative policies? What are the most promising mechanisms, initiatives, and developments that could enable developing countries to deliver on ambitious emissions reduction targets?” Learn more here and here.

Barnard Year of Science: Conservation, Collaboration, and Community

  • Wednesday, April 6, 2022. 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
  • In Person and Livestream. Location announced in registration.
  • “In this conversation, you will learn about WildCRU’s innovative approach solving conservation problems, and their commitment to their “conservation quartet” to understand, educate, involve, and implement. The panelists will also discuss how Barnard exemplifies this “quartet” in our work to research and resolve conservation problems, and they will explore the College’s current and future work in the area of conservation.” Learn more here.

A Discussion on Building a Climate and History Network at Columbia

  • Wednesday, April 6, 2022. 4 to 6 pm.
  • 513 Fayerweather Hall. Registration Required.
  • “The speakers’ specific collaborative research has worked to understand multi-decadal droughts in East Africa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They will use the preliminary work on this project to discuss the challenges and benefits of collaborations in this space and what needs to be done to cultivate and amplify climate and history collaborations more generally across Columbia University.” Learn more here.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf – To Engage or Not to Engage with AI for Critical Judgments

  • Wednesday, April 6, 2022. 5 to 6:30 pm.
  • Online. Registration required.
  • “This talk illustrates the hindering effects of opacity that professionals experienced when using AI tools and explores how these professionals grappled with it in practice. It unpacks the challenges involved in augmenting professional judgment with powerful, yet opaque, technologies and contributes to literature on AI adoption in knowledge work.” Learn more here and here.

Balancing Data Privacy and Data Sharing: Normative and Technical Approaches

  • Friday, April 8, 2022. 12 to 1 pm.
  • Online. Registration required.
  • “Data sharing is in tension with privacy obligations to individuals and groups, and threatens autonomy and control over data use. Data sharing policies, governance strategies and technical solutions have been proposed and implemented to resolve this tension. However, full resolution of this issue has not been achieved. What do ELSI scholars, data scientists, policy makers, health researchers and other stakeholders need to do to move forward?” Learn more here and here.

Chelsea Schields – Petro-Sexuality: Histories of Oil and Intimacy

  • Thursday, April 7, 2022. 5 to 6:30 pm.
  • 411 Fayerweather Hall.
  • “This talk explores the interconnections among the histories of sexuality and the age of oil. Focusing on Aruba and Curaçao, islands that once housed the world’s largest oil refineries, it charts how transnational oil companies introduced peculiar forms of sexual and reproductive regulation intended to maximize oil revenues and discipline Caribbean subjects.” Learn more here and here.

Bird, Vacuum, Observers, oh my! via Bwarchives