Author: Alex D

Today, after our wrap-up, Dr. Laber talked to us about his push to make relatively cheap education available to a wide range of people. He wants to create courses that go much deeper than current online resources like Coursera, allowing people to get a PhD-level education online. Dr. Laber believes that those looking only for education shouldn’t be forced to pay exorbitant tuition just to get a job. This set of courses would be achieved through amazon and panels of professors to find the information that needs to be taught and the best way to teach it. Due to the wide availability of such a resource, the costs can be kept low enough that anyone can learn (ex. $50).  As most high level jobs require college degrees these days, it’s imperative that such an education can be given to a greater audience.

Dr. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel is currently a professor at Duke teaching data science. She got her first degree at NYU in acturial science and worked for two years in the field, mainly calculating how many years people had left to live after retirement,  before realizing she didn’t want to do it for the rest of her life. Due to the nature of actuary jobs, it would be difficult to change careers down the road. Thus, 2 years after she started her career, she entered the statistics Phd program at UCLA. In her Phd program, Dr. Cetinkaya-Rundel enjoyed being a teaching assistant which led to her current career as a professor. As a Phd student, she worked on an open source project called OpenIntro that gave students free access to introductory content of different subjects. She also coleads Data Fest and works part time for RStudio.

Today we talked with Jesse Clifton, a graduate student at NCSU working in statistics. He’s writing his dissertation about the allocation of spare medical resources for disease and he now focuses his research on AI and how to keep it on task and safe. In high school, Jesse Clifton wasn’t a big fan of math. He started college working towards a degree in political science, but he soon found that the subject didn’t interest him enough to make a career out of it. He took math classes in college and realized that they were much more interesting than those he took in high school. This eventually led to him abandoning his political science career path and becoming a graduate student in statistics.

After speaking to Justin Weltz about his life as a graduate student, he spoke about RDS, which stands for respondent-driven sampling. Basically, it’s a form of gathering data from participants by having an initial participant bring in new participants. that creates an array of nodes and connections. Often these connections are very important, and they require inference to complete, as not all true connections can be seen through RDS.

An example of RDS can be seen below.

RDS also has a problem with bias, as similar people often group together. Justin Weltz also spoke about using reinforcement learning to optimize RDS, allowing for better recruiting and slimmer budgets.