Machine Learning
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Should a Computer Decide Your Sentence?
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Amid the election of progressive district attorneys and passage of historic sentencing reforms, many U.S. cities are making strides toward decarceration. In an effort to reduce their prison populations while addressing sentencing bias, at least 20 states employ predictive risk assessment technology during judicial decision making. Through a tailored, statistics-based…
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Could Phone Data Reveal a Person’s Wealth?
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The effective design, implementation and evaluation of public policies rely on accurate socioeconomic data. It would be impossible, for instance, to implement a poverty alleviation program without knowing who the relevant target populations are, where they live, and their economic status. As the United Nations Population Fund puts it, “without…
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A Data-Sharing Framework To Ensure Self-Driving Cars Are Road-Ready
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Rapid advances in technology have made autonomous vehicles (AVs)—once the realm of science-fiction—into an emerging reality. Auto industry newcomers such as Waymo and Tesla now compete with incumbent car manufacturing giants in a race to be the first to produce a commercially viable AV. In their haste to beat their…
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The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics: What Machine Learning Can (and Cannot) Do for Economic Research
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Machine learning (ML) is most commonly understood as a set of computational techniques applied to big datasets in order to make granular predictions for businesses, from advertising to fraud detection to user recommendations. Yet another, perhaps less appreciated, application comes from academia, where social scientists have slowly but steadily begun…
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In Their Own Words: North Korea’s Changing Motives in Nuclear Testing
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North Korea conducted three nuclear tests between 2006 and 2013, but this rate has intensified to three tests in the past two years alone. This threat of unchecked nuclear escalation has led to an all-time low in U.S.–North Korea relations and turned East Asia into a potential flashpoint. North Korea’s…