Video available here.

Join Matthew Salganik, professor of sociology and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, as he participates in the Forward Fest series discussion examining Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

As the pace of data creation and collection continues to accelerate, professors in a variety of disciplines will talk about both the power and potential perils of artificial intelligence and what limitations and safeguards we need to take into account moving forward.

Matt will speak on the robust applications of data science within the social sciences as well as his recent work on predictive modeling of life outcomes and what it has to say about the benefits and limitations of recent computational developments.

Forward Fest is a monthly online series that will continue throughout A Year of Forward Thinking. The events, featuring Princeton faculty and alumni exploring a range of forward-thinking topics, will be free and open to the public. Sparking dialogue among the entire Princeton community — students, faculty, staff, alumni and other interested thinkers — Forward Fest will explore, engage and develop bold thinking for the future.

Forward Fest is free and open to the public. RSVP now to receive updates and a resource guide, which includes must-know information about the featured speakers with links to their books, articles, podcasts and more!

Bio:

Matthew Salganik is a professor of sociology who has pioneered uses of data and digital technologies in social research. He was appointed interim director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy on July 1, 2019, and then director of CITP for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2020.

Matt is affiliated with several other Princeton’s interdisciplinary research centers, including: the Office for Population Research, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.

Matt’s research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik is currently on the Board of Directors of Mathematica Policy Research. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Russell Sage Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google. During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech and a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. During the 2018-19 academic year, he was a professor in residence at the New York Times.