How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of AI

Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times, will present a Distinguished Lecturer Seminar "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of AI" on Wednesday, May 29, 2024 at Northeastern University's Curry Student Center and online.

Abstract:

Data-empowered products and decision automated decision systems increasingly determine our political, professional, and personal realities. How did we come to this data moment? How do we shape its future as scholars and educators, consumers, and members of the electorate? I'll briefly share lessons learned from a class investigating these questions, co-developed with Matthew L. Jones, a historian of science, technology, and mathematics at Columbia University, and the resulting book published in 2023. Additional material, syllabus, readings, and code (in Python) can be found here.

‍Bio:

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute and of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, as well as the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit which since 2010, has organized once-a-semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.