From Joli Holmes ’17:
Next week the Digital and Computational Knowledge Initiative will host a
Friday lunch (April 15th) talk in Downey House 113 at noon, featuring
Wesleyan alumnus Joshua Blumenstock, a graduate of 2003 with a degree in
Computer Science and Physics. He was a Watson fellow.Joshua Blumenstock is Assistant Professor in the Information School, with affiliations in Computer Science and Engineering, at the University of Washington. He is co-Director of the Data Science and Analytics Lab, where they work on methods to analyse large-scale behavioral data, keyed to trying to understand better poverty and economic development.
Fighting Poverty with Data: Research at the Intersection of Machine Learning and Development Economics.
He’ll show how he and his collaborators have worked in Afghanistan, Ghana, and Rwanda combining field-based experiments and interviews with terabyte-scale mobile phone data to gain insight into the distribution of poverty and wealth in order to improve policy decisions.
Date: Friday, April 15
Time: 12PM-1PM
Place: Downey House