News & Events

Fall 2021 Distinguished Lecture Series

Presented by the Collective for Research on Inequality and Social Equity (CORISE) and Statistical Training and Research Techniques at Rice University

All are welcome, no registration required

October 8th at 7:00 PM
Location: Kraft Hall event space
Ghosts, Zombies, and the Possibility of Life: Human Rights Activism Against Death by Racism in the Dominican Republic
Dr. Amarilys Estrella, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Dr. Estrella explores grassroots social activism in response to the deaths of Black individuals who form part of a global movement against statelessness. She analyzes the role of reandando, returning during the process of death, as an indication of the spaces of liminality in which Black Dominicans of Haitian descent exist as ghosts, zombies, or muertos civiles, to interpret the movement’s organizing in response to death by racism.

October 9th at 7:00 PM
Location: Kraft Hall event space
Game Theoretic Tools for Machine Learning: Respice, Adspice, Prospice
Dr. Mallesh Pai, Lay Family Chair in Economics, Associate Professor of Economics

In this lecture, Dr. Pai plans to discuss how game theoretic ideas from the previous century (von Neumann's Theory of Zero Sum games, David Blackwell's theory of Approachability) provide a unified framework for several, previously disparate Machine Learning algorithms. These techniques also pave the way for new applications--- quantifying uncertainty in a model-free way. (This talk is based on work done in collaboration with Varun Gupta, Chris Jung, Sampath Kannan, Changhwa Lee, Georgy Noarov, Aaron Roth and Rakesh Vohra.)

October 10th at 7:00 PM
Location: Kraft Hall event space
Language, Speech Perception, and the Law: An Unhappy Intersection
Dr. Nancy Niedzielski, Associate Professor of Linguistics

In this talk, Dr. Niedzielski demonstrates how a process as fundamental as speech perception can be influenced by social categorization, and suggests ways in which this can have an impact on our legal system.

October 11th at 7:00 PM
Location: Kraft Hall event space
Resilience in Research and Practice
Dr. Danielle King, Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences

In this talk, Dr. King will share her research journey and personal connections to the resilience domain. She will also detail current projects underway in her resilience lab, recent empirical findings, practical implications, and unanswered resilience research questions.