Viel Glück Dr Demi!

Viel Glück Dr Demi!

Congratulations to Demival Vasques Filho (Demi), our latest student to successfully defend his PhD thesis. Demi undertook his PhD on ‘Structure and dynamics of social bipartite and projected networks’ at the University of Auckland, under the supervision of Te Pūnaha...
Bon voyage Kyle Higham, our latest PhD graduate

Bon voyage Kyle Higham, our latest PhD graduate

Congratulations to Te Pūnaha Matatini PhD student Kyle Higham, our much admired and highly active TPM Whānau past-chair and member, who successfully defended his PhD thesis recently. Kyle undertook his PhD at the Victoria University of Wellington, researching...
Te Pūnaha Matatini farewells Samin Aref

Te Pūnaha Matatini farewells Samin Aref

Congratulations to Samin Aref, a highly valued member of the TPM Whānau, for handing in his PhD thesis recently. Samin commenced his PhD under the supervision of TPM Investigator Mark Wilson, working on computationally intensive problems in complex networks. Samin has...
Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Before I started working as a research assistant on the Hidden Networks project, the only woman from the history of New Zealand science I could name was Joan Wiffen, the “dinosaur lady” who discovered New Zealand’s first dinosaur fossils in Hawke’s Bay. She was a...
How machine learning can perpetuate racism

How machine learning can perpetuate racism

I wrote this algorithm to classify people by gender, but one of the biggest things I learned was how machine learning can reinforce racism and perform poorly on ethnic minorities. Machine learning – or programs that are able to learn from and improve on past...