News and Stories

Mathematical Philosopher at Brown Bag Lunch

Aydin Mohseni, a mathematical philosopher at the University of California, Irvine, will be the featured speaker at the weekly CMCI Brown Bag Lunch on Monday, September 24.

Talk title: “On the Emergence of Minority Disadvantage: Testing the Cultural Red King Hypothesis.”

Abstract: The cultural red king effect predicts that differentials in group size may lead to inequitable outcomes for minority groups even in the absence of explicit or implicit bias. We test this prediction in an experimental context where subjects divided into groups engage in repeated play of a simplified Nash demand game. We run 14 trials involving a total of 112 participants. The results of the experiments are significant and suggestive: individuals in minority groups do indeed end up making low demands more frequently than those in majority groups, and so receive lower payoffs.

Brown Bag Lunch, Past Seminars & Workshops

Undergraduate Research at the U of I

CMCI is pleased to contribute to the research efforts at the University of Idaho and provide opportunities for students to gain hands-on field experience. Why is it important? President Chuck Staben recently asked David Pfeiffer, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, the same question and shared his answer in the Friday Letter –

President Chuck Staben: Why is undergraduate research, scholarship and creative activity so important? What do such opportunities mean for students?
David Pfeiffer: Research projects, scholarly activities and creative activities are fundamentally different from class work and the experience of doing them can engage students in wholly different ways. They demand a kind of tenacity and creativity that often isn’t fully realized in traditional classes and labs. Collectively, they are recognized as among a handful of high-impact educational practices that help foster critical thinking skills, innovation and independence in students. As such, these experiences help better prepare students for success during their degrees and beyond, regardless of their career path. Employers are not in the dark on this, and they are increasingly looking for evidence of these types of experiences on students’ resumés.

To read some of the current stories on campus about on-going research projects, check out Vandals in Focus 2018, which features some of the fascinating experiences available to students.

Research Projects

Modeling Gut Microbial Dynamics

Join us for the next joint-hosted IBEST/CMCI seminar on Thursday, September 13, 12:30 p.m. in EP 122. Sean Gibbons from the Washington Research Foundation will present, “How do we model gut microbial dynamics?“

Abstract:

Dynamics reveal crucial information about how a system functions. However, it is not yet known what the relevant timescales or models are for understanding microbial dynamics in the gut. For example, gut microbial population dynamics may be largely internal, and the stool samples we obtain likely represent the end-point of these internal dynamics. In this talk, I describe a statistical approach for disentangling different components of dynamics within the human gut microbiome: autoregressive and non-autoregressive. Autoregressive dynamics involve recovery from large deviations in community structure. These recovery processes appear to involve the blooming of facultative anaerobes and aerotolerant taxa, likely due to transient shifts in redox potential, followed by re-establishment of obligate anaerobes. Non-autoregressive dynamics carry a strong phylogenetic signal, wherein highly related taxa fluctuate coherently. These non-autoregressive dynamics may be driven by external, non-autoregressive variables like diet. Most of the community variance is driven by day-to-day fluctuations in the environment, with occasional autoregressive dynamics as the system recovers from larger shocks. Despite frequently observed disruptions to the gut ecosystem, there exists a strong returning force that continually pushes the gut microbiome back towards its steady-state configuration.

Check out the Gibbons Lab website here.

Past Seminars & Workshops

Dr. Michael Burnam-Fink at Brown Bag Lunch

Dr. Michael Burnam-Fink will be the featured speaker at our weekly CMCI Brown Bag Lunch on Monday, September 10. His talk is titled “Visualizing Collaboration: Interactive Bibliometric Network Mapping for Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research Groups” and will take place at 12:30 in the Collaboratorium, IRIC 352.

Michael is an instructor at Arizona State University and holds a Ph.D in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. His work examines the relationship between knowledge and power in the context of 21^st century science and technology. Michael was a Breakthrough Institute Breakthrough Generation Fellow and NSF IGERT Fellow.

Brown Bag Lunch, Past Seminars & Workshops

Texas Tech Professor Speaks Today

Linda Allen, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University, will speak at 12:30 p.m. today, Aug. 30, in EP 122 as part of the IBEST/CMCI Seminar Series. Her talk is titled “Probability, Duration and Final Size of an Epidemic in Stochastic Multistage or Multigroup Models.”

Past Seminars & Workshops