Case Studies

In 2017 the US Census Bureau announced that it would update the statistical methods it used to meet its statutory obligation to protect the confidentiality of information furnished to the agency. The new system would be based on an approach called “differential privacy” that ...

There is a popular narrative that the rise of automation threatens to displace a large segment of the American workforce. Robots in particular are the object of public concerns about employment. But in most American manufacturing plants—particularly small and medium firms ...

Research within the United States that involves collecting and analyzing certain types of data from individual people has been subject to regulation since 1974. The rules governing research with so-called “human subjects” emerged out of specific research practices in ...

In the age of machine learning, cryptocurrency mining, and seemingly infinite data storage capacity enabled by cloud computing, the environmental costs of ubiquitous computing in modern life are obscured by the sheer complexity of infrastructures and supply chains involved in ...

In the United States, the careful crafting of electoral districts has been a powerful tool for politicians to limit groups’ political power or exclude them from representation entirely, most prominently to the detriment of political parties and racial and ethnic minority ...