Social network analytics to aid vulnerable kids

Social network analytics to aid vulnerable kids

Te Pūnaha Matatini investigators Mike Plank, Alex James, Jeanette McLeod, and postdoc research fellow Daniel Lond, are using social network analysis to assess risk in vulnerable children in New Zealand. Collaborating with our stakeholders in the government sector...
Te Reo Māori in New Zealand Parliament

Te Reo Māori in New Zealand Parliament

As one of two summer 2017-18 student interns for the Kōrero Māori project with Dragonfly Data Science, Te Hiku Media and Te Pūnaha Matatini, we were assigned to help collect corpus of te reo Māori text that would be used to train the written language model component...
Ka pai Siouxsie!

Ka pai Siouxsie!

The 2018 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Gala Awards were held in Auckland last night, with much-admired Kristine Bartlett, rest-home carer and pay equity campaigner in the healthcare sector, taking out the top honour. Kristine’s fellow nominees included Mike...
Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Before I started working as a research assistant on the Hidden Networks project, the only woman from the history of New Zealand science I could name was Joan Wiffen, the “dinosaur lady” who discovered New Zealand’s first dinosaur fossils in Hawke’s Bay. She was a...
How machine learning can perpetuate racism

How machine learning can perpetuate racism

I wrote this algorithm to classify people by gender, but one of the biggest things I learned was how machine learning can reinforce racism and perform poorly on ethnic minorities. Machine learning – or programs that are able to learn from and improve on past...