Hello All,
I wanted to remind you that we will have our second colloquium this Thursday October 1st at 4:30pm by Dr. Nicholas Nagle!
Title: What comes after the data deluge? Science, Policy, and Privacy after the radically new Census 2020.
Abstract: Big data and artificial intelligence are changing the social science landscape. While GIScientists have greeted big data with
almost universal excitement, a rising tide of scholars and privacy advocates are speaking up about the erosion of rights to privacy and to not have our data used against us. Today, scientists at the Census Bureau are at the forefront of people grappling with
these issues. Through no fault of their own, once private census tables are now broken by big data, and at least 50 million people from the 2010 Census can be uniquely identified. This talk will show how a new privacy-preserving technology - called differential
privacy - will protect individuals in the 2020 Census by intentionally injecting error into every single count. I will the discuss the evolution of this method, highlighting how the interplay of Census scientists with other government officials, with other
social scientists, and even with other Census scientists, challenges simple notions that data are created by government. Far from being a passive place where data are created to enable governance, the Census Bureau has become a battleground where social scientists
struggle with each other to understand the implications of data and how we manage our conflicting obligations to individuals that are both the subject and object of our studies. Geographers would do well to engage with these debates more closely. On the one
hand as data consumers, we risk losing the ability to understand the most widely used data in American social science. On the other hand as data producers, we risk - at best - becoming irrelevant to discussions around the ethics of spatial data, and - at worst
- creating actual harm in the lives of individuals.
I look forward to seeing you all there!
The Zoom quick link is:
https://tennessee.zoom.us/j/91402032124
