The CS department will host the second Darema Lecture on February 2 at 5:30 p.m. on Zoom. The speaker is Dr. Sudeepa Roy from Duke University. Her talk is entitled “Interpretable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality”. The abstract of the talk along with Sudeepa’s bio is below. I hope you will join us!

The schedule is as follows:
4:50–5:20 p.m. Faculty Meet-and-Greet
5:30–6:30 p.m. Seminar
6:30–7 p.m. Student Meet-and-Greet

The link to register for the Seminar is:
https://iit-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUuc-yvrjkjGNLGoo_u2KeGfl8YkVsJWzUn

After you register you will get a confirmation email with information about joining the Zoom. We will use the same link for the Faculty meet and greet and the Student meet and great.

Abstract
In current times, data is considered synonymous with knowledge, profit, power, and entertainment, requiring development of new techniques to extract useful information and insights from data. In this talk, I will describe some concepts and techniques in interpretable data analysis from the viewpoint of a database researcher.

First, I will talk about our work on explaining query answers, in terms of “intervention” or how changes in the input data changes the output of a query, and “context” or how input data not contributing to the answers of interest can help explain them. Then I will talk about true causal inference from observational data without randomized controlled experiments and how database techniques can help with causal inference for large complex data.

Bio
Sudeepa Roy is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Duke University. She works in the area of databases, with a focus on foundational aspects of big data analysis, which includes causality and explanations for big data, data provenance, probabilistic databases, and applications of database techniques in other domains. Prior to Duke, she did a postdoc at the University of Washington, and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has served on the program committees of a number of premier conferences and workshops including SIGMOD, VLDB, PODS, and ICDT. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Google PhD Fellowship in Structured Data.