Upper School Intersession 2025

Thanks to significant advances in machine learning and data science, decision makers are embracing and employing advanced algorithms and statistical models to help with or fully automate difficult tasks across our society. With examples ranging from advertising and finance to healthcare and criminal justice, machine learning tools have become ubiquitous. While often providing significant improvements in speed and performance, these tools come with increased complexity that can make the decision making process opaque and difficult to evaluate. How did your model make that prediction? Why? Are the decisions that it makes fair? How can we quantify fairness? In this activity, we will discuss real-world examples of automated algorithmic decision making along with the practical and ethical problems they can face. We will explore the ideas of bias, fairness, safety, and interpretability.

The climate crisis does not affect all people equally. In this session, we will cover how climate emergencies and extremes magnify pre-existing vulnerabilities, increasing migration and expanding health disparities. We will define three types of climate migrants who are arriving in the United States and evaluate the health risks that they face before, during, and after their migrations.

American society has become so politically divided that some people talk seriously about the possibility of a second civil war. How did a once united country get to this crisis point? As a journalist and cartoonist, David Horsey has observed the evolution of politics in the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan. With his political cartoons as satiric guideposts, he will lay out the descending path Americans have taken into the political chasm -- essential knowledge for anyone who wants to understand contemporary political life in the United States.

The Global Justice Center is a feminist human rights organization started by the late reproductive rights advocate Janet Benshoof. GJC’s mandate is to leverage international law to advance gender equality. Toward that end, GJC focuses on two main areas: advancing reproductive autonomy as an international human right and ensuring justice for mass atrocities involving sexual and gender-based crimes. Learn how Global Justice Center conducts this crucial work, including through innovative legal analysis, advocacy with governments, and press work. Signature campaigns--including to achieve a global convention on crimes against humanity, pierce pervasive impunity for widespread sexual and gender based crimes in Myanmar, and for access to safe abortion is a fundamental right--will be discussed.