Poughkeepsie Chapter of the Association For Computing Machinery

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Topic

An Introduction to Gerrymandering (and Why It’s Important)

Speakers

Gary Ditlow and Peter Capek

When

Monday,       7:30 PM

Where

In cyberspace. To obtain the URL for this video conference, you must register to attend through the Meetup.com announcement. Meetup.com/ACM-Poughkeepsie. Once you've done so, you'll be able to access the Zoom link on Meetup's page after 6:00 PM the night of this event.

More Information

This program is free and open to the public. Because our meeting is virtual, we will not hold our normal dinner beforehand at the Palace Diner.

For further information, go to Pok.ACM.org (QR code below):

QR code RSVP to ACM Poughkeepsie at   Meetup.com

About the Topic

We will discuss the history, current status and litigation of gerrymandering and then introduce mathematical techniques that quantify when electoral maps are biased. This is an important and timely topic that affects us all, especially in an election year. Techniques such as the efficiency gap, compactness metrics, and graph partitioning algorithms will be discussed. We will then show how to apply these methods on recently drawn electoral maps which many politicians consider to be highly gerrymandered.

About the Speakers

Gary Ditlow worked at IBM Research in Yorktown and at IBM Poughkeepsie for 40 years. His areas of interest were design automation, microprocessor design, design verification, logic minimization, and circuit design. He is currently a data science consultant writing his own machine learning library, and a professional portrait photographer.

Peter Capek retired from IBM Research, where he worked on computer architecture, operating systems, and computer security, among other things. He currently serves on the board of Clearwater, and is interested in both environmental issues and the history of software.

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