Data Skeptic

While the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, joins us to discuss the complexities of modeling AGIs to accurately achieve objective functions. He touched on tangent issues such as abstractions during training, the problem of unpredictability, communications among agents, and so on.

Julian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian’s conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP community metasurvey: a survey aimed at understanding expert opinions on controversial NLP issues. He shared the process of preparing the survey as well as some shocking results.

Kyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to specific advice for detecting disingenuous or fraudulent responses and filtering them from your analysis. Finally, he shares some quick thoughts on the usage of the Chi-Square test for interpreting cross tab results in survey analysis.

Jeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup’s poll creation process. He discussed how Gallup generates unbiased questionnaires, gets respondents, analyzes results, and everything in between.

Gireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups at scale and shared the observed student performance improvements after the intervention.

Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project. The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the opinion changes between the 2009 and 2020 surveys. He also shared future plans for the PhilPapers surveys.

Today’s show focused on an essential part of surveys — missing values. This is typically caused by a low response rate or non-response from respondents. Yajuan Si is a Research Associate Professor at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. She joins us to discuss dealing with bias from low survey response rates.

We are joined by two guests today, Mariah, a Ph.D. student in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Matthew Gombolay, the Director of the CORE Robotics Lab. They both discuss practices for measuring a respondent’s perception in a survey.

Ever wondered what your next career would be? Today, Keyon Vafa, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, joins us to discuss his latest research on developing a machine-learning model for career prediction. Keyon extensively spoke about how the model was developed and the possibilities it brings.

Noura Insolera, a Research Investigator with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), joins us to share how PSID conducts longitudinal household surveys. She also shared some interesting findings from their data exploration, particularly on the observation and trends in food insecurity.

Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the results of that survey. You can see those results at the link below. https://survey.dataskeptic.com/survey/result/1675102237053 Watch the videos Susan mentioned on her Youtube page at the link below. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7VAuaQDhPTVaLeI1IcpYph5lH19xA1u4

The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Utah. Sara shares from her research, how she detected social bots, the strategies to curb them, and how underrepresented groups can be more represented in surveys.

Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete replication of their research and findings. He used Bem’s experiment as an example, extensively talking about his methodology and results.

On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform data science projects. He revealed the methodologies typically used by data practitioners and the success factors in data science projects.

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He explained how quantifying opinions is complex, and strategies to develop robust models for measuring and predicting public opinions.

Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Alexander discussed the use of Casual Affective Triggers (CAT) to incentivize people to accept survey invitations and improve the completion rate. He revealed the impact of CATs on survey response rates from a study he conducted.

Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc Researcher in the FATE group at Microsoft Research Montréal, talks about conversational surveys, a type of survey that asks questions based on preceding answers. He discussed the benefits of conversational surveys and some of the challenges it poses.

Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and security surveys on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Prolific. Jenny shared the drawbacks of using such online platforms, the discrepancies observed about the samples drawn, and key insights from her results.

This episode kicks off the new season of the show, Data Skeptic: Surveys. Linhda rejoins the show for a conversation with Kyle about her experience taking surveys and what questions she has for the season. Lastly, Kyle announces the launch of survey.dataskeptic.com, a new site we're launching to gather your opinions. Please take a moment and share your thoughts!

It may be intuitive to think crowdfunding a project drives its innovation and novelty, but there are no empirical studies that prove this. On the show, Johannes Wachs shares his research that sought to determine whether crowdfunding truly drives innovation. He used board games as a case study and shared the results he found.