“When the Supreme Court declares your homework unconstitutional: Reflections on data science and society”
Presented by David Hunter, Department of Statistics – Penn State University
Thursday, January 20, 2022
12:00 P.M. HOLMES HALL – 116 Hislop Family Auditorium
Abstract: The 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case known as Gratz v. Bollinger addresses a formula for college admissions that was created by a statistics graduate student (the presenter) for a specific purpose. The method used to create this formula is considered simplistic by modern machine learning standards; yet the debate that ensued, which could not have happened if a more modern approach had been used, illustrates that science and society do not always benefit from machine learning models that achieve the best possible predictive performance. This talk discusses the history of the legal case, the admissions formula and how it was created, and the implications of the debate for how we build predictive models.
PIZZA Provided!