Important decisions such as police deployment, loan approvals, hiring, and parole from incarceration are beginning to be made by machine learning algorithms. This has lent urgency to the question of whether these algorithms are fair. A recent well-publicized analysis of recidivism risk predictions studied NorthPointe’s proprietary COMPAS algorithm used in Read more
Classical tools for rigorously analyzing data make the assumption that the analysis is static: the models to be fit, and the hypotheses to be tested are fixed independently of the data, and preliminary analysis of the data does not feed back into the data gathering procedure. On the other hand, Read more
In recent years, graphics processing units (GPUs) have thoroughly permeated consumer processor designs. It is now essentially impossible to find a smartphone, tablet or laptop without a substantial integrated GPU on the processor die. Utilizing these omnipresent GPUs, however, remains a challenge. Writing correct and performant parallel code, a notoriously Read more
The World Well-Being Project (WWBP) is pioneering scientific techniques for measuring psychological well-being and physical health based on the analysis of language in social media. As a collaboration between computer scientists, psychologists, and medical researchers, we are shedding new light on the psychosocial processes that affect health and happiness and Read more
When a data analysis result is published or shared, how do we know whether it is trustworthy? Conceptually, we must show that each step of the analysis (and each set of parameters used in the step) was justified, and that the original data was itself trustworthy. A team of Penn Read more
The goal of this project is to create fundamentally new defenses against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can provide far greater resilience to these attacks compared to existing solutions. Today’s responses to DDoS attacks largely rely on old-school network-based filtering or scrubbing, which are slow and manual, and cannot handle Read more
In our interconnected world, software bugs and security vulnerabilities pose enormous costs and risks. The Deep Specification project addresses this problem by showing how to build software that does what it is supposed to do, no less and (just as important) no more: No unintended backdoors that allow hackers in, Read more