It’s my 8th and ~last~ semester at Penn, so I’ve decided to attend more talks before I graduate, all of which I’ll keep track of in this thread.

Let’s start w/ a throwback: Jr. year, I attended a talk by V. Preciado on moment-based spectral analysis of graphs. Didn’t understand most of it, but it made me realize that I’m interested in how things spread through networks & that’s what has led to my current research project.

Just listened to @mkearnsupenn and @Aaroth talk about their book, The Ethical Algorithm. Leaving there, I’m now very interested in starting a discussion with one of my friends who is currently working with Penn to build predictive models using admission data.

Listened to @sarahsunnbush talk about why trust in government is disappearing, which was a nice (and interesting) break from the data/computer science work that I’ve been spending most of my time on with respect to the elections.

My new goal is to be that random undergrad who crashes colloquia. Favorite quote from today’s @Wharton Marketing colloquium: “If your model has predictive power AND interpretability, something must be wrong.”

Last week, I attended this talk and I bumped into someone who’s on my research team. “Rachel, I’m surprised you have the time to attend this,” she exclaimed. Well, as Victor was speaking, I had two models training on Google Collab and was drafting a report. https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙃" title="Upside-down face" aria-label="Emoji: Upside-down face">

One good thing that’s come out of everything that’s happening now is that talks are more accessible because they’re all online.