Fri 3/1 5-6pm SCCE A131: Detecting Subtle Repetitions in Persian Miniatures: A Thesis Talk and Crowdsourcing Event

[Matteo Riondato]

A cool thesis talk by senior Kalea Ramsey'24, majoring in CS and in Art
and history of Art, see below (also, flyer attached).

My thesis uses a dataset of 5,897 Shāhnāma (The Persian Book of Kings)
illustrations to examine the behaviour of manuscript and lithograph
artists, in an attempt to discover a pattern that can be used as a model
for analyzing repetitions of motifs in particular narratives. The
objective is to propose a flexible model that captures the complexity of
'copying' among artists across centuries (14th-20th) and regions (mainly
Iran and India) who worked on the Shāhnāma.

Informed by the context of artistic practices, I treat each illustration
as a collection of compositional units. I train a machine learning model
to detect units depicting certain objects, isolate them, then cluster
them by visual similarity. The model learns from human annotations and
predicts more accurately over time, so I need annotators! Come to this
event to look at rare illustrations, annotate images in real-time, help
improve the accuracy of my model, and be a part of my thesis!

This event includes a 15 minutes thesis talk followed by a 45 minutes
annotation workshop (requires laptop). No prior experience is necessary,
participation in annotation is voluntary, and training will be provided.

SCCE A131
5-6 PM Friday, March 1st
Kalea Ramsey ’24

--
Thanks,
Matteo

[Nicholas Horton]

Dear DSI folks,

I wanted to invite you to next week's talk in the Statistics and Data Science Colloquium by Francesca Dominici (Harvard University).

Here's an overview of her work:

Dr. Francesca Dominici is a data scientist whose pioneering scientific contributions have advanced public health research around the globe. Her life’s work has focused broadly on developing and advancing methods for the analysis of large, heterogeneous data sets to identify and understand the health impacts of environmental threats and inform policy.

Dr. Dominici received her B.S. in Statistics from University La Sapienza in Rome, Italy and her Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Padua in Italy. She did her postdoctoral training with Scott L. Zeger and Jonathan M. Samet at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and in 2007 she was promoted to Full Professor with tenure. Dr. Dominici was recruited to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a tenured Professor of Biostatistics in 2009. She was appointed Associate Dean of Information Technology in 2011 and Senior Associate Dean for Research in 2013. She is currently the Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. Dr. Dominici was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018.

Dr. Dominici is also the founder and the lead PI for the National Studies on Air Pollution and Health Group (NSAPH), which is a group of faculty, research scientists, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and college students studying data science methodologies in the context of climate change, environmental impacts on health outcomes, and regulatory policy. The group has over 100 members and includes 25 Principal Investigators & Faculty over 12 institutions.

Dr. Dominici is also one of the lead PIs for the BUSPH-HSPH Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center, CAFÉ. The CAFÉ is a three-year cooperative agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a critical component of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative to manage and support ongoing climate change and health research and capacity building efforts.



And here's the info about the talk:

Tuesday March 5, 2024: noon talk, 11:45am refreshments (both in Seeley Mudd 206)
Francesca Dominici (Harvard University)
Title: Decoding climate vulnerability: Harnessing the power of data science and causal inference


Finally, we have some spaces available at the dinner that is planned on Monday, March 4th. Can you please let me know by the end of the day on Wednesday, February 28th if you'd like to join us?

Best wishes for your semester


Nicholas Horton
Beitzel Professor of Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science)
Amherst College

If you receive this outside of your working hours, it is because I am working flexibly in a way that works for me. I respect other working patterns and don’t expect replies outside working hours.

[Matteo Riondato]

This event is happening today. We'll have snacks before/during the
event, sponsored by the DSI.

Hope to see you there!

Feel free to share the word!