Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1.

Fotini is well-positioned to guide IDSS into the next chapter. With her tenure as the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as an associate director of IDSS since 2020, she has actively forged connections between the social sciences, data science, and computation, says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I eagerly anticipate the ways in which she will advance and champion IDSS in alignment with the spirit and mission of the Schwarzman College of Computing.

Fotinis profound expertise as a social scientist and her adept use of data science, computational tools, and novel methodologies to grasp the dynamics of societal evolution across diverse fields, makes her a natural fit to lead IDSS, says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Christias research has focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, for which she has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and Yemen, among others. More recently, her research has been directed at examining how to effectively integrate artificial intelligence tools in public policy.

She was appointed the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and an associate director of IDSS in October 2020. SSRC, an interdisciplinary center housed within IDSS in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, focuses on the study of high-impact, complex societal challenges that shape our world.

As part of IDSS, she is co-organizer of a cross-disciplinary research effort, theInitiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. Bringing together faculty and researchers from all of MITs five schools and the college, the initiative builds on extensive social science literature on systemic racism and uses big data to develop and harness computational tools that can help effect structural and normative change toward racial equity across housing, health care, policing, and social media. Christia is also chair of IDSSs doctoral program inSocial and Engineering Systems.

Christia is the author of Alliance Formation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations, and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeremy Weinstein (incoming dean at Harvard Kennedy School) of Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust, forthcoming in August 2024 with Cambridge University Press.

Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science,among other journals. Her opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other outlets.

A native of Greece, where she grew up in the port city of Salonika, Christia moved to the United States to attend college at Columbia University. She graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a joint BA in economicsoperations research and an MA in international affairs. She joined the MIT faculty in 2008 after receiving her PhD in public policy from Harvard University.

Christia succeeds Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Selin has led IDSS as interim director for the 2023-24 academic year since July 2023, following Professor Martin Wainwright.

I am incredibly grateful to Noelle for serving as interim director this year. Her contributions in this role, as well as her time leading the Technology and Policy Program, have been invaluable. Im delighted she will remain part of the IDSS community as a faculty member, says Huttenlocher.

Read more here:

Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society - MIT News

Peek in medicine cabinets across the U.S. and youll find stacks of leftover COVID-19 tests.

When symptoms arise, so do questions: When should I test? How accurate is it really? And what should I do if I test positive?

In a paper published June 14 in the journal Science Advances, CU Boulder researchers unveil a new mathematical model to quickly answer such questions, not only for COVID but also for emerging rapid tests for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the flu and other infectious diseases.

One key takeaway: Advice can differ widely depending on the bug.

For COVID, we found that if you only have one test, its best to wait two days after symptoms arise to use it, because the virus is unlikely to be detectable until then, said first author Casey Middleton, a doctoralstudent in the department of Computer Science and the IQ Bio program. For flu and RSV, youre best off to take that rapid test when you first feel symptoms.

Middleton and senior author Daniel Larremore, a professor of computer science at the BioFrontiers Institute, developed the model to address several challenges that have emerged with the post-pandemic proliferation of rapid tests.

Dan Larremore's lab combines math, computer science and biology to answer public health questions.

In recent years, companies have rolled outall-in-one tests that check for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), influenza A and B, and RSV simultaneously, and some doctors offices and pharmacies offer a combo, while-you-wait option.

Meanwhile, at-home COVID testing has become the norm, with people routinely self-collecting nasal swabs to protect friends and family.

If youre trying to make a decision about whether to go to book club or go to Bingo night with the grandparents, testing is a really good idea, said Larremore, whose lab combines computer science, math, epidemiology and biology to address public health challenges. But COVID has changed, each variant behaves differently and that means the way that they interact with tests may be different.

When he and Middleton plugged information about Omicron variants, patient behavior and other factors into their new computational model, it revealed that if a person with COVID tests immediately with a rapid test when symptoms emerge, they receive a false negative as much as 92% of the time. Waiting two days after symptoms brings that rate down to 70%. For those who can afford to take a second test on day 3, the false negative rate dips lower, with the tests catching about a third of infections.

Thats because, with most people already previously exposed, their immune systems are primed to react upon seeing COVID again, and that immune response itself causes symptoms. In addition, new variants in folks with some immunity grow slightly more slowly than the original strain.

Our symptoms are happening sooner, but it takes longer to reach enough virus in your body for it to be detectable, said Middleton.

With RSV and flu, on the other hand, the virus multiplies so quickly that once symptoms set in, theres already plenty to make a test show up positive.

This is the conundrum, said Larremore. If you go in right away and test for all three, you can learn a lot from the flu and RSV tests, but you may have swung too early for COVID. If you wait a few days, the timing might be right to catch COVID but you are too late for flu and RSV.

While a 66% false negative rate may seem high for a COVID test, Larremore notes that the tests are designed to identify folks who have a high viral load and are, thus, most likely to infect others.

Diagnosing only one third of infections can still cut transmission substantially if we've diagnosed the most infeciouts third," he said.

Assuming that enough at-home tests are available, their study also suggests that a test to exit strategyin which people test again before determining whether to return to work and socializecan prevent more COVID infections with less inconvenience than the five-day isolation policy that was standard Centers for Disease Control advice until March.

The five-day isolation policy made people isolate for too long in most cases, said Middleton. Test-to-exit does a good job releasing people early who arent going to transmit but holding those who still have high amounts of virus.

Larremores previous research was instrumental in informing how COVID-19 vaccines were distributed early in the pandemic and for helping to convince policymakers to prioritize rapid testing.

He and Middleton hope that their new model can help companies develop better tests, help clinicians give better advice and, should another pandemic arise, enable policy-makers to offer swift, data-driven guidance on testing.

If done correctly, the next generation of rapid tests have the potential to be really impactful, Larremore said.

Excerpt from:

Think you might have COVID? Wait 2 days to test - University of Colorado Boulder

Hogan is a doctoral student in computer science at UC San Diego and lives in Santee.

This fall will be my third time teaching introductory computer science inside Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center to a new cohort of UC Irvine students. I began my doctorate degree in the Computing Education lab at UC San Diego in fall 2021 knowing that I wanted to study how to improve computing education in prisons. With the support of my three advisers, I secured the opportunity to teach with LIFTED for the first time in fall 2022.

I receive a fair amount of skepticism from computing academics when I introduce my research (i.e., can they really learn to code?), especially after revealing the severity of the technology restrictions. So far, I have found the answer to be largely positive. However, I believe it is yet to be understood the degree of grit, resourcefulness and brilliance it takes for my students to succeed despite incredible barriers.

One of the most significant challenges for computing specifically is that students are not able to run code on their prison-issued laptops. Much of my work thus far has been developing and documenting strategies some of them entirely created by the students to simulate and supplement the critical learning for novice programmers that happens in the trial-and-error process of running code, identifying errors and fixing them. With these strategies, along with the unique assets students bring to the classroom, many students are able to achieve similar levels of proficiency to students in introductory programming courses on main campus with wildly different access to all types of resources.

However, as power and resources in our society are increasingly concentrated with those in control of our technology, structural changes will need to take place in order to truly expand the pool of those trained with computing expertise to include those impacted by incarceration and the marginalized populations they overrepresent. While higher education in prison programs have grown in recent years, there are currently no computer science degrees offered. Reasons for this include restricted access to critical technology inside, but also the difficulty college-in-prison programs face in recruiting computer science faculty. This is, at least in part, because computer science professors are currently experiencing greater demand on main campuses, and consequently require higher pay to temporarily replace them (e.g., to afford a lecturer to cover for a faculty member teaching in prison). While a short-term solution could be having graduate students (like myself) teach the computer science courses in the prison, this would create a lower standard of quality in the prison than on main campuses. If students earn the same degree in prison as on main campuses, this cannot be. At the same time, offering only the less in-demand, and therefore more affordable, areas of study in prison reproduces inequity by excluding the incarcerated students from currently more popular or lucrative majors.

Research shows that every dollar invested in correctional education returns $4-$5 in savings of taxpayer dollars, as people leaving prison have the skills needed to succeed instead of returning to prison. Therefore, I believe the necessary long-term solution should include government funding specifically to offer science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees in prison, building on existing policies supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom in the past, such as incentivizing community colleges to offer degrees in California prisons. In addition, building educational technology infrastructure in prisons needs to include critical technologies for STEM disciplines.

Creating access to computing degrees in higher education in prison programs such as LIFTED, and pipelines to careers in technology, is a necessary step towards equity in technology, higher education and the criminal justice system. Despite ongoing narratives about science-related fields being objective and neutral, the benefits and harms of current technology in our society are undeniably biased. In recent examples, machine-learning algorithms incorporated into sentencing procedures were shown to be racially biased, and facial recognition technology used in policing is less accurate for people of color. It is no coincidence that technology innovations in our society continue to fail people from racial groups overrepresented in our prison population. I believe that meaningful progress towards equity in computing higher education and our criminal justice system are similarly stagnated as long as we continue to block access to computing higher education pathways in prison.

Originally posted here:

Opinion: Teaching computer science in the prison has been a challenging and rewarding experience - The San Diego Union-Tribune

KINGSTON, R.I. June 20, 2024 Artificial intelligence is quickly reshaping education, especially for students, teachers and administrators in kindergarten through high school.

A recent poll by the Walton Family Foundation found that use of AI among teachers and students has rapidly risen in the last year. In K-12, the number of teachers who say they are familiar with ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot, has grown from 55% to 79%. Among students, its risen from 37% to 75%. Usage has also grown with nearly half of teachers and students saying they use ChatGPT at least weekly.

To help local K-12 educators prepare for this paradigm shift, the University of Rhode Island is partnering with local education groups to provide a series of professional development workshops on AI for teachers and administrators. Workshops will be held July 22-23 for teachers and July 24 for administrators in the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering on the Kingston Campus. More than 100 teachers and 50 administrators have already registered for the free workshops. For more information or to register, go to the event webpage.

Just a year and a half ago, we wouldnt be having this discussion. But now almost all educators are aware of AI and almost all of their students are using it. And its dramatically changing how they teach, said Victor Fay-Wolfe, URI professor of computer science. The impacts have been on two sides for educators how they can use it in their own professional development and delivery of education and how they teach their students to use it effectively and responsibly.

The AI workshops which are being organized by Fay-Wolfe and Jessica Barrett, URIs K-12 computer science program manager, along with Rhode Islands statewide CS4RI initiative, R.I. Society of Technology Educators (RISTE) and R.I. Computer Science Teachers Association have grown, in part, out of the Computer Science Departments extensive work in K-12 computer science education and teacher training. The initiatives have built a large network of educators, who asked for guidance and education in AI.

The all-day workshops 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. are geared to educators who have differing levels of knowledge and experience with AI tools. The workshops for teachers will include an introduction to AI; its capabilities and limitations; and concerns such as data privacy, student cheating, and assessing student learning along with providing teachers a chance to experiment with AI tools, including building lesson plans, said Barrett. For administrators, workshops will include an overview of AI along with sessions on policy development and advocacy to communicate the need for AI integration in their school districts.

The workshops will provide a nice introduction and foundation for all educators regardless of their experience, said Barrett. Its meant to be a first step for a lot of educators. We are planning future workshops for professional development and to enable educators to form district teams and put what theyve learned into practice for the benefit of all educators, students, and other stakeholders in the district.

The workshops will be led by Vanessa Miller, technology integration coach in the Narragansett School District and member of RISTE and the Computer Science Teachers Association, and will feature hands-on sessions and panels that include URI faculty and students.

We thought it was important that the educators heard from students so they understand that students are already using AI and want to learn about it, said Fay-Wolfe. I think theres a little bit of naivete that students arent using AI as extensively as they are.

The AI in K-12 Education program is the newest initiative in the URI Computer Science Departments work to bolster teacher training, develop standards and provide guidance for computer science education in Rhode Island.

Through the states CS4RI program, started by then-Gov. Gina Raimondo in 2016, URI has trained more than 2,000 Rhode Island school teachers to deliver computer science education at their schools. Also, more than 2,000 high school students have earned college credits in computer science through concurrent enrollment in the last seven years.

As members of the CS4RI core team, Barrett and Fay-Wolfe have also helped develop state standards for computer science education, and Fay-Wolfe helped secure a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2019 that provided funding for 20 Rhode Island high schools to establish or enhance computer science pathways.

Our primary role is training teachers, said Fay-Wolfe. Thats what were doing this summer, training teachers and educators in AI. Weve been training teachers in computer science for seven years now.

See the rest here:

URI to host free workshops for educators on impact of AI on K-12 education - The University of Rhode Island

Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers that she was transgender, despite her significant technological innovations and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later died on June 9 in Jackson, Mich. She was 86.

Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died in a hospital from complications of two recent heart attacks.

In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was among the earliest Americans to undergo transition surgery. But she kept it a secret, living in what she called stealth mode for 31 years out of fear of career reprisals and concern for her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually landing at the fabled Xerox PARC laboratory, where she again made important contributions in her field. After she publicly disclosed her transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.

IBM offered its apology to her in 2020, in a ceremony that 1,200 employees watched virtually.

Ms. Conway was probably our very first employee to come out, Diane Gherson, then an IBM vice president, told the gathering. And for that, we deeply regret what you went through and know I speak for all of us.

Ms. Conways innovations in her field were not always recognized, both because of her hidden past at IBM and because designing the guts of a computer is unsung work. But her contributions paved the way for personal computers and cellphones and bolstered national defense.

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Lynn Conway, Computing Pioneer and Transgender Advocate, Dies at 86 - The New York Times