Stage one of the Fragile Families Challenge, the predictive modeling stage, ended today at 2pm ET.  We are grateful to everyone who participated.  This is not, however, the end of the Fragile Families Challenge.  In fact, there are many important and exciting things to come.  We will be:

• hosting the Fragile Families Challenge meet-up at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Sunday August 13 at 2pm.
• awarding prizes.
• open sourcing the submissions to the Challenge.
• publishing a single paper presenting the design and results from the Challenge.
• publishing a special issue of Socius, a new open access journal published by the American Sociological Association, about the Fragile Families Challenge.
• hosting the Fragile Families Challenge Scientific Workshop on November 16 & 17.
• conducting research to discover important and unmeasured factors, prioritize issues for intervention, and compare modeling approaches.

We are looking forward to all of the next steps in the Fragile Families Challenge.

We are happy to announce the Fragile Families Challenge Scientific Workshop will take place November 16th and 17th (Thursday and Friday) at Princeton University.  The workshop is open to everyone interested in the Challenge, and we will be livesteaming it for people who are not able to travel to Princeton (note: videos of the talks are now available).

On Thursday, we will meet in Palmer House (map). On Friday, we will meet in Wallace Hall 300 (map).

The schedule will be:

• Thursday: Workshop of submissions to the special issue of Socius and breakout projects. All are welcome regardless of whether you have written a paper.
• Friday: Presentations by prize winners. All are welcome to attend, regardless of whether you have won a prize.

If you plan to join us, please complete the registration form.

Thursday, November 16

The first day of the Fragile Families Challenge Scientific Workshop will be devoted to: 1) workshopping papers submitted to the Special Issue of Socius on the Fragile Families Challenge and 2) working on breakout projects.

Workshopping papers

Before the workshop, each participant will be sent 3 papers to read. Participants are expected to read these papers before arriving at the workshop. This will ensure that we have a lively and focused discussion. If you are unable to read the papers ahead of time, please let us know and plan to arrive at lunch time.

Then at the workshop, each paper will be discussed for 45 minutes in a series of parallel roundtable sessions. There will be no presentations by the author because everyone will have read the paper ahead of time. Instead, each session will begin with very brief comments by a pre-assigned moderator, and then there will be a group discussion, which will be facilitated by the moderator. We expect these to be lively, fascinating, and generative discussions.

• “Black Box Models and Sociological Explanations: Predicting GPA Using Neural Networks” by Thomas Davidson
• “Humans in the Loop: Priors and Missingness on the Road to Prediction” by Connor Gilroy, Anna Filippova, Ridhi Kashyap, Antje Kirchner, Allison Morgan, Kivan Polimis, Adaner Usmani, and Tong Wang
• “Privacy, ethics, and high-dimensional social science data: A case study of the Fragile Families Challenge” by Ian Lundberg, Arvind Narayanan, Karen E.C. Levy, and Matthew J. Salganik
• “Making the analysis of complex survey data more efficient, reliable, and enjoyable: A case study from the Fragile Families Challenge” by Alexander T. Kindel, Kristin Catena, Tom Hartshorne, Kate Jaeger, Dawn Koffman, Sara S. McLanahan, Maya Phillips, Shiva Rouhani, and Matthew J. Salganik
• “Modeling and Decision Making with Social Systems: Lessons Learned from the Fragile Families Challenge” by Brian Goode, Debanjan Datta, and Naren Ramakrishnan
• “The Pentlandians ensemble: Winning models for GPA, grit, and layoff in the Fragile Families Challenge” by Daniel Rigobon, Eaman Jahani, Yoshihiko Suhara, Khaled AlGhoneim, Abdulaziz Alghunaim, Alex Pentland, and Abdullah Almaatouq
• “Predicting material hardship using machine learning” by Erik H. Wang, Diana Stanescu, and Soichiro Yamauchi
• “The challenges of data science from social science: Using social science knowledge in the Fragile Families Challenge” by Stephen McKay
• “Predictive features of children GPA in Fragile Families” by Naijia Liu, Hamidreza Omidvar, and Jinjin Zhao
• “Variable selection and parameter tuning for BART modeling in the Fragile Families Challenge” by James Wu and Nicole Carnegie

Breakout activities

With so many amazing people all in one place, we also wanted to leave time for ideas that you propose, either ahead of time or as a result of the workshopping of the papers. Any participant can propose an idea, and then people can choose which one they want to work on. We’re also going to propose the following projects:

• Code walkthrough for the new Fragile Families metadata API (lead by Maya Phillips)
• Demo and testing for new metadata website (lead by Alex Kindel)
• Testing and improving the Docker container that ensure reproducibility of the special issue (lead by David Liu)
• Assessing test-retest reliability of concept tags (lead by Kristin Catena)
• Help us digitize question and answer texts (lead by Tom Hartshorne)

Schedule for Thursday

• 08:30 – 09:00 Breakfast
• 09:00 – 09:15 Intro
• 09:15 – 10:00 Round 1 of papers
• 10:00 – 10:15 Break
• 10:15 – 11:00 Round 2 of papers
• 11:00 – 11:15 Break
• 11:15 – 12:00 Round 3 of papers
• 12:00 – 1:00 Lunch
• 1:00 – 1:30 Discussion of project ideas
• 1:30 – 5:00 Breakout activities
• 5:00 – 6:00 Break
• 6:00 – ??? Dinner

Friday, November 17

The second day of the Fragile Families Challenge Scientific Workshop will be devoted to presentations from the organizers and prize winners.  Videos of these talks are now available.

• 8:30 – 9:00. Breakfast
• 9:00 – 9:45. Welcome, Overview of the Fragile Families Challenge
• • Matthew J. Salganik, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
  • Sara S. McLanahan, William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Principal Investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
• 9:45 – 10:00. Break
• 10:00 – 11:15. Presentations from progress prize winners and discussion
• • Onur Varol, Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Complex Network Research, Networks Science Institute, Northeastern University
  • Julia Wang, Princeton University
  • Stephen McKay, School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK
• 11:15 – 11:30. Break
• 11:30 – 12:00. Presentation from foundational prize winner and discussion
• • Gregory Gundersen, PhD Student in Computer Science, Princeton University
• 12:00 – 1:00. Lunch
• 1:00 – 2:00. Presentations from innovation prize winners and discussion
• • Nicole Carnegie, Assistant Professor of Statistics, Montana State University
  • Brian J. Goode, Research Scientist, Discovery Analytics Center, Virginia Tech
• 2:00 – 2:30. Break
• 2:30 – 4:00 Presentations from final prize winners and discussion
• • Kristin Porter, Senior Associate, MDRC
  • Diana Stanescu, Erik H. Wang, and Soichiro Yamauchi, Ph.D. students, Department of Politics, Princeton University
  • Abdullah Almaatouq (MIT), Eaman Jahani (MIT), Daniel E. Rigobon (MIT), Yoshihiko Suhara (Recruit Institute of Technology and MIT)
• 4:00 – 4:30. Break
• 4:30 – 5:00. What’s next
• • Matthew J. Salganik, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
  • Sara S. McLanahan, William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Principal Investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

We will update this page as we have more information. If you have any questions about the Scientific Workshop, please email us.