Knowledge Under Fire.
Knowledge is power, but that power can be threatening. Book banning, misinformation, anti-science movements, and the outright negation of known history are examples of a looming post-truth era. Shifting attitudes about the value of higher education and institutions that support inquiry and innovation in arts and sciences only exacerbate fears that knowledge is under fire. This series will explore knowledge under fire from multiple perspectives. What is threatening about knowledge? What is at stake when knowledge is under fire? This series will engage speakers across disciplines to examine the precursors and impacts of current challenges.
Fall 2025 Lecture Schedule
September 23, 2025, 4pm | Sewall Hall Auditorium
Speakers
Hengrui Luo, Assistant Professor of Statistics
Title: "Interpretability of decision trees in AI era"
Abstract:
Decision trees remain compelling because they read like flow charts: start at a root, answer simple questions, and reach a decision you can explain. Rather than retiring trees in an era of massive neural networks, we revisit them with three advances. First, we reframe splitting to prioritize questions that best separate high- from low-value cases, yielding shallower, easier-to-read trees without losing accuracy. Second, we introduce tensor-input trees that handle complex data—such as MRI scans and satellite images—by aggregating many pixels into a single, human-interpretable rule. This preserves transparency while scaling to high-dimensional inputs. Third, we outline a minimax martingale principle: a safety-first criterion that controls risk at each node so decisions remain reliable as the tree grows. Together, these ideas modernize decision trees, combining interpretability, efficiency, and robustness and offering a practical alternative—or complement—to deep models when clarity and trust are as important as performance. Results are simple, fast, dependable.
Erin Baumgartner, Director of the Houston Education Research Consortium
Title: "The fight for public knowledge in education"
Abstract:
Significant changes to the U.S. Department of Education are likely to have an impact on how local school districts serve pre-k to 12 students. Beyond funding and policy changes, losing access to important data and research directly from the department or through work historically supported by the department, these changes mean we must re-envision the way we provide support to public schools. In this moment, it is more important than ever for researchers evolve the way they share research, the audiences they communicate it to, and how they design and conduct equity-oriented research.
Spring 2026 Lecture Schedule
TBA, 2026, 4pm | TBA
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