PRIISM Seminars
Spring 2025 Seminars
Competitive Self-Presentation and GAI: Decisions, Diversity, and Disparities in College Admissions
A seminar by Dr. Austin van Loon, assistant professor of work and organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, about an ongoing online experiment investigating how generative AI in college admission essays may reshape the demographic makeup of admitted students and transform how merit is evaluated.
Watch recording of Austin van Loon' talk
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with item-level data: Insights from Item Response Theory
A seminar by Joshua Gilbert, a PhD candidate in Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, on how to unmask hidden treatment effects within individual test items using Item Response Theory and to understand how to overcome the limitations of traditional single-score analyses.
Watch recording of Josh Gilbert's talk
AI-Assisted Conversational Interviewing: Effects on Data Quality and User Experience
A seminar by Dr. Soubhik Barari, Quantitative Social Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago, on how AI-powered textbots can enhance response quality and scalability, while considering challenges in bias and respondent experience.
Watch recording of Soubhik Barari's talk
Building Adaptive Assessments for Psychological Assessments with Continuous Response Formats
A seminar by Dr. Alfonso J. Martinez, assistant professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology at Fordham University, on how to construct adaptive assessments with items that allow for continuous (as opposed to discrete) responses.
Fall 2024 Seminars
A Simple, Statistically Robust Test of Discrimination
A seminar by Johann Gaebler, PhD candidate at Harvard University, on how to test for racial discrimination using a hybrid approach of benchmark and outcome tests.
Watch recording of Johann Gaebler's seminar
Measurement Matters: Creating Gender Dysphoria and Minority Stress Scales for Trans and Nonbinary Adolescents
A seminar by Jules Wood, research assistant professor at Washington University in St Louis, about how to create high quality gender dysphoria and minority stress scales for trans and nonbinary adolescents.
Watch recording of Jules Wood's seminar
Informing Educational Assessment with Test-Taking Process Data
A PRIISM Seminar by Susu Zhang, assistant professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about incorporating behavioral and response process data into measurement models for item responses.
Watch recording of Susu Zhang's seminar
Locally Dependent Mixed Membership Estimation for High-dimensional Categorical Data
A PRIISM seminar by Yuqi Gu, assistant professor at Columbia University, about an alternative to Latent Class Analysis, the Grade of Membership model and its estimation with multivariate categorical data.
Watch recording of Yuqi Gu's seminar
Prompt Stability Scoring for Text Annotation with Large Language Models
A PRIISM seminar by Christopher Barrie, assistant professor of sociology at NYU, about how traditional approaches to intra- and inter-coder reliability scoring can be adapted to measure prompt stability in language models.
Spring 2024 Seminars
Accessible Causal Inference
A PRIISM Seminar by George Perrett, visiting assistant professor at NYU and PRIISM, about the importance of making causal inference methods scaffolded and accessible, demonstrated with new software and data from a recently conducted randomized experiment.
Preferences among Queer Individuals when Asking Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Survey Questions
A PRIISM seminar by NYU's QUEER Data Lab about how to construct survey demographic questions that consider respondents’ personal satisfaction and perceived representation of members of the queer community.
Beyond Exclusion: The Role of High-Stakes Testing on Attendance the Day of the Test
A seminar by Magdalena Bennett, assistant professor at University of Texas at Austin, exploring the impact of high-stakes testing on student attendance on the day of the test using rich administrative data from Chile.
Watch recording of Magdalena Bennett's seminar
Design Sensitivity and Its Implications for Weighted Observational Studies
A seminar by Sam Pimentel, assistant professor at UC Berkeley, about design sensitivity, illustrated by a study examining drivers of support for the 2016 Colombian peace agreement. Read the paper Design Sensitivity and Its Implications for Weighted Observational Studies.
Domain Adaptation under MNAR Missingness Shift
A seminar by Tyrel Stokes, postdoc at NYU Langone, about a novel domain adaptation procedure for MNAR missingness shift and how to apply this procedure to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data.
Fall 2023 Seminars
Measurement error and interpretability of latent class models
A seminar by Brian Flaherty, associate professor of quantitative psychology, at the University of Washington, about how restricted latent class models can be used to produce interpretable classes with reasonable measurement error rates.
This seminar was co-sponsored by the Department of Biostatistics.
Inferential Artificial Intelligence (iAI): Case Studies in Computational Statistics, Machine Learning, and Global Health
A seminar by Seth Flaxman, associate professor, at the department of Computer Science, Oxford about “inferential Artificial Intelligence” (iAI) through a series of case studies on important global health challenges.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).
Measuring Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition
A seminar by Allison Koenecke, assistant professor of Information Science at Cornell University, on how to use statistical methods to measure racial disparities in the performance of automated speech recognition systems and ensure they are more inclusive.
October 4, 2023
Shortening and adapting in person vocabulary assessments in the era of online data collection
A seminar by Daphna Harel, associate professor of Applied Statistics and Susannah Levi, associate professor of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU, on how to transfer vocabulary assessments to an online environment and the benefits of doing online data collection.
September 20, 2023
Spring 2023 Seminars
Big Team Science Means Big Method Opportunities
A seminar by Erin Buchanan, Professor of Cognitive Analytics at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology on how to effectively integrate newer computational linguistic methods, power estimations, and adaptive testing into large-scale social science projects.
April 19, 2023
Applications of Bayesian Item Response Theory and Bounded Continuous Models
A seminar by Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti, faculty member in the Fowler School of Engineering at Chapman University, on how to use Item Response Theory and its application to metamemory data.
March 29, 2022
Can Foreign Aid Boost State Legitimacy During Conflict? Experimental Evidence from Education Aid in Afghanistan
A seminar by associate professor Dana Burde and doctoral candidate Rena Deitz from NYU , on how randomized control trials can be used to evaluate government legitimacy in conflict-affected countries.
March 1, 2023
Estimating Test Score Reliability From Self-Selected Test Repeaters: An Application to the Duolingo English Test
A seminar by J.R. Lockwood, principal assessment scientist at Duolingo, on how to estimate test score reliability from self-selected test repeaters.
February 15, 2023
