Another stop on my fall Facebook/OKCupid tour: on October 10, I’ll be participating on a panel (previewed in the NYT here) on “Experimentation and Ethical Practice,” along with Harvard Law’s Jonathan Zittrain, Google chief economist Hal Varian, my fellow PersonalGenomes.org board member and start-up investor Ester Dyson, and my friend and Maryland Law prof Leslie Meltzer Henry.
The panel will be moderated by Sinan Aral of the MIT Sloan School of Management, who is also one of the organizers of a two-day Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE), of which the panel is a part. The conference, which brings together academic researchers and data scientists from Google, Microsoft, and, yes, Facebook, may be of interest to some of our social scientist readers. (I’m told registration space is very limited, so “act soon,” as they say.) From the conference website:
The ability to rapidly deploy micro-level randomized experiments at population scale is, in our view, one of the most significant innovations in modern social science. As more and more social interactions, behaviors, decisions, opinions and transactions are digitized and mediated by online platforms, we can quickly answer nuanced causal questions about the role of social behavior in population-level outcomes such as health, voting, political mobilization, consumer demand, information sharing, product rating and opinion aggregation. When appropriately theorized and rigorously applied, randomized experiments are the gold standard of causal inference and a cornerstone of effective policy. But the scale and complexity of these experiments also create scientific and statistical challenges for design and inference. The purpose of the Conference on Digital Experimentation at MIT (CODE) is to bring together leading researchers conducting and analyzing large scale randomized experiments in digitally mediated social and economic environments, in various scientific disciplines including economics, computer science and sociology, in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.