Abstract: In the U.S., cities are clearly the places where nonpartisan efforts to cope with some of our greatest challenges are taking hold. I'll talk about two illustrations of this trend: fiber optic networks being installed in 800 places in the country, and adaptation to sea-level rise in Charleston, S.C. and Boston. The big story is that making a thick civic mesh of effective government involvement visible at the local level should, eventually, help Americans trust government more. I'll explain why this is so important. Here is a link to FIBER, available...

We are living now in a radical age. How we date, whom we marry, and even what it means to be a man or woman, are all changing at a dizzying pace. In the 1950s, an unmarried mother was scorned and humiliated. Now, single woman regularly purchase their pregnancies through donor sperm and freeze their eggs for later. In the 1970s, gay men were routinely harassed and ostracized, forced either to deny their sexuality or keep it tightly locked in the proverbial closet. Now gay marriage is legal in more than 20 countries and gay weddings are featured prominently in the social pages of most...

Fair Machine Learning and Moral Philosophy

Organizations are increasingly using machine learning systems to make important decisions about how to treat particular individuals. The fair machine learning literature in computer science seeks to develop mathematical, computational, and software tools to help ensure that these systems are fair to the individuals concerned. What sort of tools will be most useful for this purpose depends in part on the nature of the concrete moral problems they are supposed to help us address. This talk will explore the nature of...

Identifying and Monitoring Disinformation across Social Platforms: Techniques for Discovery and Analysis

The dominant social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) have become critical vectors in the spread of mis- and disinformation impacting political discourse. As the platforms...