32 papers on data science, health, bias, and more It’s time for CHI 2022, so here’s my personal reading list, based on titles, abstracts, and a quick skim of all the papers published in the ACM DL. (I’m interested in data science, health, and bias in modeling and annotation, so…

Using simulations to design for interactive machine learning — This blog post summarizes a conference paper presented at IUI 2022 (pdf). If you prefer video, see my presentation at the conference. Here’s a common situation: I’ve got a collection of text documents and an idea for a classification task. I decide I want to use machine learning to explore…

OLS can be misleading for ordinal variables When we have ordered categorical (ordinal) data, such as star ratings, it is common to treat this data as continuous and model it using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). However, this approach has been criticized by some statisticians. Here’s Alan Agresti in Analysis of…

CSCW 2021 is coming up fast and these are my paper picks. No particular order, just papers that stood out to me. Papers are generally related to health, social media, and interactive machine learning, as those are my interests. …

A roundup of introductory Information Theory sources Andrew Little asked a useful question on Twitter: “Anyone know a good source for explaining the basics of information theory (Shannon entropy, etc.) to dense social scientists?” I’m a dense social scientist who’s been meaning to dig more into information theory, so I…

Creating a simple optimizer for my fantasy league. Like more than 20% of Americans, I was invited to participate in a fantasy football league this year. One key problem: I don’t watch football and don’t know any of the players. …

With CHI2020 officially cancelled this year, I wanted to take the time to highlight papers from the program that I thought were interesting. I’m a social computing researcher interested in health/social support, AI, and methodology, so that’s what you’ll find below! Loosely sorting into three sections, I highlight 8 papers…

I wanted to build a handheld, WiFi-connected prototype as cheaply as I could. The Omega2 seemed like a great fit, but I’ve never worked with anything smaller than a laptop! …