Digital Synergies Presents at the Faculty of Arts Celebration of Research

On March 5 2020, Digital Synergies presented at the Faculty of Art's Celebration of Research - an event to showcase its various Signature Research Areas.

On March 5th 2020 Digital Synergies presented at the Faculty of Art's Celebration of Research - an event to showcase its various Signature Research Areas. With only seven minutes to show what we are all about, we spent our time collecting data, synthesizing it, and analyzing it all in front of the crowd at the Timms Centre for the Arts. 

Our own researchers Dr. Astrid Ensslin, Dr. Matthew Guzdial, Chelsea Miya - with help from Dr. Kyle Stooshnov and Morgan Cselinacz - presented on how even simple data sets could harbor bias, and the importance of keeping this in mind while working with data sets. Through "The Quest to Decode Human Bias in Computation", our researchers collected data on the audience about their favorite color and number. After some quick computing, we showed the audience their favorite color and their favorite number, and even using a simple machine learning algorithm to show what another audience may look like based on their inputs. 

Finally, we delved into some of the possible bias issues with the data - this included accessibility issues, political bias, choice bias, to just name a few. 

Below are a few photos of our lovely researchers at work. Overall, it was an insightful and successful event! Make sure to stay tuned for future Digital Synergies events in the future by joining our listserv by e-mailing digisyn@ualberta.ca. 

Please see below for the full video of our presentation!