Courses

Dive into an enlightening oceanographic presentation that unveils the groundbreaking results of a decade-long project aimed at cataloging all life forms in the world's oceans. Explore fascinating photographs showcasing unexpected discoveries made during the Census of Marine Life, as renowned oceanographer Paul Snelgrove takes you on a captivating journey through the depths of our planet's aquatic ecosystems.

Explore the fascinating results of a decade-long project aimed at cataloging all life in the world's oceans in this 17-minute TED Talk by oceanographer Paul Snelgrove. Discover surprising findings from the Census of Marine Life as Snelgrove shares stunning photographs of newly discovered marine species and ecosystems. Gain insights into the incredible biodiversity of our planet's oceans and the importance of understanding and preserving marine life for future generations.

Learn advanced C# concepts including IEnumerable, Indexer, Enumerator, Operator Overloading, Custom Casting, and Anonymous Types in this comprehensive tutorial. Explore creating custom collections, implementing indexers, overloading operators, converting objects to strings and integers, and working with anonymous types. Follow along with the provided code examples and practice exercises to enhance your C# programming skills.

Learn to rapidly visualize and explore demographic data from the United States Census Bureau using tidyverse tools. Analysts across industries rely on data from the United States Census Bureau in their work. In this course, students will learn how to work with Census tabular and spatial data in the R environment. The course focuses on the tidycensus package for acquiring data from the decennial US Census and American Community survey in a tidyverse-friendly format, and the tigris package for accessing Census geographic data within R. By the end of this course, students will be able to rapidly visualize and explore demographic data from the Census Bureau using ggplot2 and other tidyverse tools, and make maps of Census demographic data with only a few lines of R code.

Explore the fascinating world of tetrahedral hyperbolic manifolds in this 55-minute lecture by A. Vesnin. Delve into the intricate details of a comprehensive census, gaining insights into the classification and properties of these unique geometric structures. Learn about the methodologies used to identify and categorize tetrahedral hyperbolic manifolds, and discover their significance in the field of quantum topology. Enhance your understanding of hyperbolic geometry and its applications in modern mathematical research.

Learn to use the Census API to work with demographic and socioeconomic data. Data scientists in diverse fields, from marketing to public health to civic hacking, need to work with demographic and socioeconomic data. Government census agencies offer richly detailed, high-quality datasets, but the number of variables and intricacies of administrative geographies (what is a Census tract anyway?) can make approaching this goldmine a daunting process. This course will introduce you to the Decennial Census and the annual American Community Survey, and show you where to find data on household income, commuting, race, family structure, and other topics that may interest you. You will use Python to request this data using the Census API for large and small geographies. You will manipulate the data using pandas, and create derived data such as a measure of segregation. You will also get a taste of the mapping capabilities of geopandas.

Explore the concept of differential privacy in this 13-minute video collaboration between MinutePhysics and the US Census Bureau. Discover how mathematical techniques are used to protect individual privacy while still allowing for meaningful statistical analysis of large datasets. Learn about the challenges of maintaining confidentiality in the digital age and the innovative solutions developed by researchers and statisticians. Gain insights into the importance of privacy protection in data collection and analysis, with a focus on applications in census data. Delve into the technical aspects of differential privacy, including its mathematical foundations and practical implementations. Understand the balance between data utility and individual privacy, and how this approach is being applied to real-world scenarios.

Explore the intersection of mathematics and policy in this lecture on privacy in Census data. Delve into the Census's "differentially private" disclosure avoidance mechanism for the 2010 Decennial release, which intentionally introduces controlled random noise to released numbers. Examine the TopDown algorithm's mathematical aspects, focusing on its implications for redistricting. Learn about the contrasting reactions from different sectors, including computer science departments and community organizers. Investigate the algorithm's impact on redistricting, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and racial polarization statistics. Analyze a case study from Irving, TX, and explore reconstruction algorithms, error variance, and budget allocation in the Census code. Gain insights into the challenges and future directions of balancing data privacy with accurate representation in Census data.

Explore the implementation of differential privacy for the 2020 U.S. Census in this USENIX Enigma Conference talk. Delve into the scientific, technical, and organizational challenges faced by the U.S. Census Bureau in bringing cutting-edge privacy technology from theory to practice. Learn about the development process, including assembling a team, creating a reference implementation, transitioning to Amazon Web Services, and redesigning the implementation framework. Discover how the Bureau conducted experiments, performed end-to-end testing, and re-released data from the 2010 Census using the new system. Gain insights into the evolution of differential privacy since its invention in 2006, the technical hurdles overcome, and the ongoing efforts to meet user expectations. Understand the complexities of deploying differential privacy in a large-scale statistical operation and the implications for future privacy-preserving data releases.

Explore a comprehensive lecture on tetrahedral hyperbolic manifolds and links presented by Andrei Vesnin. Delve into the intricate world of geometric topology as the speaker discusses the classification and properties of these mathematical structures. Gain insights into the methods used to create a census of tetrahedral hyperbolic manifolds and their relationships to links in three-dimensional space. Learn about the latest research findings and open problems in this fascinating area of mathematics, which bridges hyperbolic geometry and knot theory.

Learn how to connect a ListFragment to the Census App, enabling contact updates upon item selection in this Android development tutorial. Discover techniques for storing and passing contact IDs between activities, and explore methods to streamline code by separating duplicate functionality into a separate class. This 22-minute video builds upon concepts introduced in part 18 of the series, offering practical insights into efficient Android app development.

Explore the power of Ruby's iteration and data series tooling in this conference talk from RubyConf Mini 2022. Dive into case studies that demonstrate how to compose Enumerable methods, generate custom object series, and create clean interfaces for collections with multiple valid traversal orders. Go beyond the Enumerable module to discover the capabilities of Enumerators and Ranges. Learn techniques to write objects that enhance code readability and bring joy to your team. Gain insights into leveraging Ruby's full potential for building delightful interfaces and improving your data manipulation skills.

This free course brings national census data to life by highlighting the vibrant stories of the diverse residents of Milton Keynes. This ‘new town’ with an increasingly mixed population, serves as a rich case study for understanding demographic changes in ethnicity and religion across the UK. The approach can be applied in any local context. It encourages reflection upon personal lived experience and its relationship to the complexities of identity, ethnicity and religion, as observed in the census statistics over time.

Explore the critical issues surrounding the 2020 US Census in this 46-minute talk from The Aspen Institute. Delve into the challenges posed by budget cuts, changes in race categorization, proposals to count only American citizens, and the shift to digital implementation. Examine the potential consequences of these changes on the accuracy of the count and their impact on democracy. Learn about the risks of undercounting certain populations, particularly immigrants and racial minorities. Gain insights from speakers David Leonhardt and Arturo Vargas as they discuss congressional representation, the Voting Rights Act, and the importance of the Partnership Program. Understand the complexities of the citizenship question and its implications. Discover strategies for addressing undercounting, messaging to diverse communities, and navigating the conflicting views surrounding this crucial democratic process. Reflect on the lessons learned and the hope for an accurate and inclusive census despite the challenges.

Explore the concept of differential privacy and its application to the 2020 US Census in this 58-minute lecture by Harvard University's Cynthia Dwork. Delve into the Fundamental Law of Information Reconstruction and understand why introducing noise is crucial for maintaining privacy in large datasets. Learn about the mathematically rigorous definition of differential privacy, its unique properties, and how it provides useful statistics while protecting against powerful adversaries. Discover the challenges faced by the US Census Bureau in implementing differential privacy for billions of statistics and the impact on traditional data consumption methods. Gain insights into the motivation behind differential privacy, its implementation, and its significance in balancing data utility and privacy protection in large-scale statistical analyses.

Explore the innovative use of Apache Spark and differential privacy in protecting respondent confidentiality for the 2020 US Census in this 29-minute talk. Dive into the challenges of balancing data accuracy with privacy protection while distributing $675 billion in federal funds and apportioning the US House of Representatives. Learn about the custom-built Spark application that performs millions of optimizations using mixed integer linear programs on a massive cluster. Discover the design of this differential privacy application and the sophisticated monitoring systems implemented in Amazon's GovCloud to oversee multiple clusters and thousands of application runs. Gain insights into the TopDown Algorithm (TDA) and how it addresses key challenges in monitoring Spark. Understand the importance of the Disclosure Avoidance System in enforcing global confidentiality protections for census data.

Discover how to effectively assess and improve open source project health through community surveys and maintainer personas in this 19-minute conference talk. Learn the importance of understanding user demographics and maintainer roles in open source communities. Explore the process of conducting a community census to gather valuable insights about user preferences, pain points, and potential migration factors. Gain practical ideas for implementing surveys in your own projects to identify critical areas for improvement. Examine common maintainer personas and their roles in project governance beyond coding. Understand how aligning user expectations with maintainer perceptions can lead to better software development. Draw inspiration from the speaker's experience with Apache Cordova and the W3C WebView Community Group to enhance your open source project management skills.

Explore the critical role of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the modern economy through this informative webinar. Delve into the findings of the "Census II of Free and Open Source Software – Application Libraries" report, which analyzes data from over half a million observations of FOSS libraries used in production applications across thousands of companies. Discover the most widely used FOSS libraries, gain insights into the future health of FOSS, and learn how organizations can leverage this research to enhance their operations. Understand the challenges in assessing the health, economic value, and security of FOSS due to its decentralized nature, and explore the methodology behind this comprehensive study conducted by Linux Foundation Research, the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH), and OpenSSF.

Explore quantum error correcting codes through a comprehensive quantum seminar that introduces a novel Quantum Lego framework for design and analysis. Learn how this universal framework enables the creation of both stabilizer and non-stabilizer codes on qubits or qudits through simple lego block combinations. Discover how this innovative method leads to new quantum codes with transversal non-Clifford gates and opens possibilities for automated code design using machine learning. Examine the role of weight enumerator polynomials in determining code properties, including rate and distance, while understanding their application in optimal decoders. Master the tensor network method for computing general weight enumerator polynomials, which offers improved efficiency over existing algorithms. Conclude with an exploration of XP stabilizer codes featuring non-abelian stabilizer groups, presented by Virginia Tech Assistant Professor Charles Cao, whose expertise spans quantum information theory and quantum gravity with emphasis on quantum error correction and AdS/CFT correspondence.

Explore differential privacy in theory and practice through this seminar by Abie Flaxman from the University of Washington. Delve into the application of differential privacy in the 2020 US Census, examining its impact on data accuracy and confidentiality. Learn about the constitutional requirements for the Decennial Census, the legal obligations for data protection, and the potential trade-offs between privacy and utility. Discover recent research findings on the implementation of differential privacy in census data, including a case study using 1940 census information. Gain insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by this new approach to data protection, and consider areas where theoretical innovations could lead to practical improvements. Understand the unique features of census data, including mandatory participation and legal confidentiality requirements. Explore the concept of differential privacy through concrete examples and discuss its potential to democratize decision-making regarding privacy and accuracy trade-offs in data collection and dissemination.