Bailey Flanigan (Applied Stats)

Today's Speaker

Bailey Flanigan (Harvard), "Algorithmic tools for targeting sortition ideals"

Abstract

In the past few years, there has been a flurry of computer science research on sortition, the task of randomly sampling a representative subset of people. This work has so far been primarily applied to choose members of citizens' assemblies, but it could in principle apply to a much broader range of democratic models for direct citizen participation in governance. This talk will describe the key challenges of sortition in practice, and then overview some of the algorithmic tools that have been developed to mitigate these challenges.

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.