Looking back at day two of the CSSS 25th anniversary celebration

Friday May 18th events took place in UW’s Intellectual House, starting with opening remarks by Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio, and boasting more than 150 attendees.  

The daytime program included scientific sessions and a lunch seminar. The morning scientific session, Advances in Social Network Analysis, highlighted an area of long-standing research interest among CSSS faculty.  Sociologist Weihua An, anthropologist and CSSS alum Siobhán Mattison, and statistician Weijing Tang presented their work. CSSS affiliate faculty Yuan Hsiao, UW Department of Communication, delivered a stellar discussion.  

Over lunch, CSSS partnered with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) to bring back Emilio Zagheni, former UW Sociology and CSSS affiliate faculty and currently Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Emilio gave a talk titled "Measuring and understanding the dynamics of populations of scholars" that was also livestreamed as a webinar. 

The afternoon scientific session focused on the timely topic of Bias, Fairness, and Inequality in an Algorithmic Age. The speakers addressed how algorithmic ranking of colleges affects student college choice (James Chu, Sociology); how to use causal approaches to define, measure and achieve fairness (Razieh Nabi, Biostatistics), and how to achieve fair inference with hierarchical models (Peter Hoff, Statistical Science). In the follow-up discussion to these talks, which touched on the current state of quantitative social science, Kosuke Imai emphasized that the gap between technical and substantive fields is widening fast due the incredible technical progress and increased data availability. This means that the need for researchers who could bridge between statistic and social sciences is as important as ever. 

In the evening, we welcomed close and long-term friends of the Center to a dinner featuring a keynote address delivered by CSSS Alumni John Ahlquist. Check out the group photo below! 

We are immensely proud of the impact our Center has had over the past 25 years, and thrilled how many friends, students, alumni, and faculty came together to celebrate this milestone.  

Read about day one of our anniversary event here.