Google Streetview now provides an enormously rich picture of the physical streetscapes of the world's cities. Advances in computer recognition techniques make it possible to use images to predict local demographics or the curb appeal of particular places. We show how the combination of Google Streetview and computer vision techniques can map the patterns of neighborhood in six American cities. We also use these methods to predict income in...
Predictive models are increasingly used in the criminal justice system to try to predict who will commit crime in the future and where that crime will occur. But what happens when these models are trained using biased data? In this talk, I will present two examples of how biased data is used in the criminal justice system. In the first example, I will introduce a recently published model used...
The theory of belief functions, sometimes referred to as evidence theory or Dempster-Shafer theory, was first introduced by Arthur P. Dempster in the context of statistical inference, to be later developed by Glenn Shafer as a general framework for modelling epistemic uncertainty. Belief theory and the closely related random set theory form a natural framework for modelling situations in which data are missing or scarce: think of extremely rare events such as volcanic eruptions or power plant meltdowns, problems subject to huge...
Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) are faraway exploding stars used as ``standardizable candles'' to determine cosmological distances, measure the accelerating expansion of the Universe, and constrain the properties of dark energy. Inferring peak luminosities of SN Ia from distance-independent observables, such as the shapes and colors of their light curves (time series), underpins the evidence for cosmic...
