CS+Law
Research Workshop

When: Third Friday of each month at 1PM Central Time (sometimes fourth Friday; next workshop: Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time) 

What: First 90 minutes: Two presentations of CS+Law works in progress or new papers with open Q&A. Last 30 minutes: Networking.

Where: Zoom

Who: CS+Law faculty, postdocs, PhD students, and other students (1) enrolled in or who have completed a graduate degree in CS or Law and (2) engage in CS+Law research intended for publication.

A Steering Committee of CS+Law faculty from Berkeley, Boston U., U. Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, North Carolina Central, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn, Technion, and UCLA organizes the CS+Law Monthly Workshop. A different university serves as the chair for each monthly program and sets the agenda.

Why: The Steering Committee’s goals include building community, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and getting students involved. To accomplish this, we ask that participants commit to attending regularly.

Computer Science + Law is a rapidly growing area. It is increasingly common that a researcher in one of these fields must interact with the other discipline. For example, there is significant research in each field regarding the law and regulation of computation, the use of computation in legal systems and governments, and the representation of law and legal reasoning. There has been a significant increase in interdisciplinary research collaborations between researchers from CS and Law. Our goal is to create a forum for the exchange of ideas in a collegial environment that promotes building community, collaboration, and research that helps to further develop CS+Law as a field.

Workshop 29: Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time

Please join us for our next CS+Law Research Workshop online on Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Chicago Time).

Workshop 29 Organizer:  University of Chicago (Aloni Cohen)

Agenda:

20-minute presentation - Christian Cianfarani

10-minute Q&A

20-minute presentation - Manish Raghavan

10-minute Q&A

30-minute open Q&A about both presentations

30-minute open discussion 

Presentation 1:

Presenter: Christian Cianfarani, PhD student in computer science at the University of Chicago

Papers: Understanding and Mitigating the Impacts of Differentially Private Census Data on State Level Redistrictin

Abstract: 

Data from the Decennial Census is published only after applying a disclosure avoidance system (DAS). Data users were shaken by the adoption of differential privacy in the 2020 DAS, a radical departure from past methods. The change raises the question of whether redistricting law permits, forbids, or requires taking account of the effect of disclosure avoidance. Such uncertainty creates legal risks for redistricters, as Alabama argued in a lawsuit seeking to prevent the 2020 DAS's deployment. We consider two redistricting settings in which a data user might be concerned about the impacts of privacy preserving noise: drawing equal population districts and litigating voting rights cases. What discrepancies arise if the user does nothing to account for disclosure avoidance? How might the user adapt her analyses to mitigate those discrepancies? We study these questions by comparing the official 2010 Redistricting Data to the 2010 Demonstration Data -- created using the 2020 DAS -- in an analysis of millions of algorithmically generated state legislative redistricting plans. In both settings, we observe that an analyst may come to incorrect conclusions if they do not account for noise. With minor adaptations, though, the underlying policy goals remain achievable: tweaking selection criteria enables a redistricter to draw balanced plans, and illustrative plans can still be used as evidence of the maximum number of majority-minority districts that are possible in a geography. At least for state legislatures, Alabama's claim that differential privacy ``inhibits a State's right to draw fair lines'' appears unfounded.

Presentation 2:

Presenter: Manish Raghavan, Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Paper: Synthetic data and swapping for the US Census

Abstract: 

In 2020, the US Census Bureau began using differential privacy to protect respondent privacy. Until then, the Bureau used a procedure known as "swapping." In contrast to the TopDown algorithm, which is public, little is known about how swapping was implemented. Moreover, simulating the swapping procedure requires access to secret Census "microdata," which are only released 72 years after a decennial Census. Our work makes two contributions. First, we design and implement a method to generate synthetic Census microdata given a combination of Census data products. Our approach is based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for combinatorial optimization. Second, we implement a swapping algorithm that is consistent with public descriptions of the Bureau's own swapping procedure. The combination of these allows us to analyze the errors introduced by swapping and their consequences on downstream analyses of interest.

Join us to get meeting information

Join our group to get the agenda and Zoom information for each meeting and engage in the CS+Law discussion.

Interested in presenting?

Submit a proposed topic to present. We strongly encourage the presentation of works in progress, although we will consider the presentation of more polished and published projects.

2023-24 Series Schedule

Tuesday, September 26, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Northwestern)

Monday, October 23, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UCLA)

Friday, November 17, 11:30 to 1:30 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Boston University)

Friday, December 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Penn)

Thursday, January 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Georgetown)

Friday, February 23, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Berkeley)

Friday, March 22, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Cornell)

Friday, April 19, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Ohio State)

Friday, May 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Tel Aviv + Hebrew Universities)

Background - CS+Law Monthly Workshop

Northwestern Professors Jason Hartline and Dan Linna convened an initial meeting of 21 CS+Law faculty at various universities on August 17, 2021 to propose a series of monthly CS+Law research conferences. Hartline and Linna sought volunteers to sit on a steering committee. Hartline, Linna, and their Northwestern colleagues provide the platform and administrative support for the series.