Week 15 Activity (Tuesday): Colloquium talk at Mudd
This week, Harvey Mudd College hosts a talk by Marina Knittel, from the University of Maryland, College Park, who is a candidate for a faculty position in the CS department at the college. The talk begins at 4:15 PM on Tuesday, but a reception with refreshments will be held outside at 4:00 PM.
There is no talk on Thursday this week, so this is the only talk this week and the last talk of the semester. Because this week's talk is on a Tuesday, we have slightly different rules for this week for students enrolled in CS Colloquium (CS 195).
- We would be hugely pleased to have you attend this talk. These talks don't only let us see a faculty candidate, they also let the faculty candidate see us, so having a good audience is important.
- If you can't attend the talk in person, you can watch the recording of the talk after the event.
RSVP for the Talk
To help us better plan for the event, if you're enrolled in Colloquium, please let us know if you plan to attend the talk (or not!). You can do so by indicating at the link below:
Fair, Low-Cost Hierarchical Clustering
Abstract
We explore algorithms for developing demographically fair hierarchical clustering under Dasgupta's cost function. For example, consider clustering news articles which are labeled with their political bias: 50% "liberal" and 50% "conservative". A cluster in the hierarchy represents search terms, i.e., the articles outputted to the user for a specific query. Under demographic fairness, we would require about half of each query result to be liberal and half to be conservative. In this talk, we will expand upon this motivating example, introduce techniques for achieving fairness, present the state of the art results, and discuss future directions.
About Marina Knittel
Marina Knittel is a graduating PhD in computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park. They study a range of topics in graph algorithms, including fair partitioning algorithms, massively parallel computation, and mechanism design. More generally, they are interested in the ethics of large-scale computation and AI, or really just any problem that can be formulated on a graph.
When and How to Attend
- Tuesday, December 5
- Location: Galileo McAlister, Harvey Mudd College
- Optional reception begins at 4:00 PM
- Talk runs from 4:15–5:30 PM
Recording for those who can't attend
(You must be logged in to view this video.)
This video is provided for students who didn't attend the talk in person. The video is private, so please don't share it with others.
Required Assessment
To receive credit for attending this colloquium, complete the assessment:
Please do so at your soonest convenience, within 24 hours of seeing the talk.
(When logged in, completion status appears here.)