Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Momin Malik, Harvard University "Revisiting 'All Models are Wrong': Addressing Limitations in Big Data, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Momin Malik - Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
Title:
Revisiting "All Models are Wrong": Addressing Limitations in Big Data, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science
Abstract:
In the immortal words of George E. P. Box (1979), "All models are wrong, but some are useful." This is an important lesson to recall amidst hopes and claims that digital trace data, the high-dimension and low-assumption models of machine learning, and advancements in computational social science are overcoming the limitations of the past. In this talk, I review the fundamental limitations with which all quantitative research must grapple, and discuss how these limitations manifest today.
Larger data captures more heterogeneity and allows for studying finer and finer subpopulations and phenomena, but as I demonstrate with geotagged tweets, selection bias still makes results fail to generalize to larger populations. The platforms from which we gather data are not research utilities, and I model the introduction of Facebook's "People You May Know" recommender system to show how social media platforms' efforts to solicit desirable behavior from users changes what we think we observe. Through considering co-location data via mobile phone sensors versus friendship self-report, I consider how new forms of measurement do not necessarily supersede previous forms but capture different underlying constructs that can be fruitful opportunities for research. I conclude with a theoretical overview of limitations of forms of quantitative modeling, from the inevitable reliance on central tendencies in probability-based modeling through to how cross-validation can break down in the presence of dependencies.
This talk will serve as a useful overview about modeling limitations and critiques, as well as possible fixes, for researchers in and practitioners of data science, computational social science, social physics, statistics, and machine learning. It will also be useful as a primer for those outside these fields on the appropriate and inappropriate uses of techniques from them.
Speaker Bio:
Momin M. Malik is the Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He holds an undergraduate degree in history of science from Harvard, a master’s from the Oxford Internet Institute, and a master's in Machine Learning and a PhD in Societal Computing from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation measured how much social media platform effects, demographic biases, and reliance on mobile phone sensor data can threaten generalizability of findings in computational social science. His current work bridges machine learning and science studies to understand the sources of both success and failures in machine learning.
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)