PRIISM Seminars
Fall 2025
On the Responsible use of Pseudo-Random Number Generators in Applied Scientific Research
A seminar by Dr. Charles Rahal, associate professor in data science and informatics at the University of Oxford, on the use of pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) responsibly in research.
Watch recording of Charles Rahal
Identifying and Reducing Administrative Burden Using Design and Data
A seminar by Dr. Jae Yeon Kim, incoming assistant professor of public policy at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill about how human-centered design and experimentation can be used to identify and reduce administrative burdens in government support programs.
Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook
A seminar by Dr. Jenny Allen, assistant professor of technology, operations, and statistics at NYU Stern, about how lab experiments, crowdsourcing, and machine learning were combined to evaluate the impact of different types of vaccine-related content on US Facebook users.
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.
