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DTSTART:20070311T020000
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DTSTAMP:20260413T084227
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T142000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Digital Financial Services and Women’s Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania\, joint with Rachel Heath
DESCRIPTION:Can increasing women's use of digital financial services raise their empowerment? We test this hypothesis using a randomized control trial with 152 female microfinance groups in Tanzania\, where treated groups were randomly switched from cash to mobile money loan repayment. This exogenous increase in women's use of mobile money leads women to expand their use for other types of transactions\, including business payments and saving. Women's control over their finances increases and they are more empowered within the household. Over time\, women's businesses become more profitable. These findings highlight the benefits of shifting payments to digital for women.
UID:147663-21901480@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147663
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:seminar,Development,Economics
LOCATION:North Quad - 4325
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260407T104324
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T150000
SUMMARY:Presentation:Emily Traficante - Dissertation Defense
DESCRIPTION:Please join Emily Traficante for their dissertation defense titled \"Accessing Olefin-Containing Polycyclic Scaffolds and Progress Toward the Total Synthesis of Herquline A\".\n\n*Date:* Thursday\, April 16th\n*Time:* 1:00 PM\nZoom Meeting ID: 957 9881 9031\nPassword: herquline
UID:147491-21901105@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147491
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Chemistry
LOCATION:Off Campus Location
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260416T122030
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T143000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:IGR/ALA429 4/16/26 (CommonGround)
DESCRIPTION:
UID:147507-21901154@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147507
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sessions
LOCATION:
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260402T103846
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T143000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:Imagining and Building a Better World for Black Families
DESCRIPTION:This conversation with Dorothy Roberts and Joyce McMillan centers the lived experiences of families impacted by welfare systems and considers possibilities for building new systems of care. Moderated by social work educator and practitioner\, Rick Barinbaum\, attendees from a range of educational backgrounds (e.g.\, social work\, sociology\, law\, public policy\, medicine) will deepen their understandings and discover new perspectives—all while laughing together and learning from these incredible scholars\, educators\, and advocates.\n\nNo reservations necessary!
UID:147086-21900367@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147086
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sociology,Social Justice,Poverty Solutions
LOCATION:Michigan Union - Pendleton Ballroom
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20250820T132640
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T143000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Influencing Change at Any Level
DESCRIPTION:Course details and registration are available on the Organizational Learning website.
UID:137827-21880826@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/137827
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Professional Development,Self Development,Culture
LOCATION:Off Campus Location
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260403T112823
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T150000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:Modeling Structure in Unstructured Data: Statistical and Causal Perspectives
DESCRIPTION:Modern machine learning systems are trained on massive amounts of unstructured data such as text\, images\, and sequences. Despite the apparent lack of explicit structure\, they exhibit remarkable abilities to learn patterns\, perform reasoning\, and support decision-making. This apparent paradox raises a central question: what structure do these models recover from unstructured data\, and how can we understand and use it?\n\nThis dissertation investigates how language models (i) represent structure through their architectures\, (ii) learn structure from unstructured data\, and (iii) enable us to leverage this learned structure for principled causal inference with unstructured data.\n\nThe first part develops a statistical perspective of attention mechanisms\, the core building block of modern language models. We show that attention can be interpreted as adaptive mixture-of-experts models. This interpretation enables us to extend attention to model general exponential family-distributed data\, making it capable of modeling complex\, heterogeneous data beyond text. In turn\, this perspective reframes attention as a statistical model\, explaining how it captures complex dependencies and latent structure\, with guarantees on identifiability and generalization.\n\nThe second part examines how such structure arises from unstructured training data. We show that many in-context learning behaviors can emerge directly from co-occurrence patterns in unstructured text\, linking modern models to classical co-occurrence modeling tools like latent factor modeling. At the same time\, we identify the limits of this mechanism: positional structure becomes essential for more complex reasoning tasks. We further demonstrate that training data composition plays a critical role in shaping model behavior and alignment\, with example difficulty acting as a key factor.\n\nThe final part studies how learned representations in language models can be leveraged for causal inference in high-dimensional\, unstructured settings. Our approach identifies causal variables directly within the representation space\, enabling well-defined estimation of causal effects when treatments or outcomes are themselves unstructured. In particular\, we isolate representation directions corresponding to the most causally influential treatment components and the most salient treatment-induced outcome variations.\n\nTogether\, these results provide a unified perspective on how modern machine learning systems extract structure from unstructured data\, and how that structure can be harnessed for rigorous statistical and causal analysis.
UID:147382-21900950@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147382
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Dissertation
LOCATION:West Hall - 438
CONTACT:
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DTSTAMP:20260414T163628
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T140000
SUMMARY:Careers / Jobs:The Real Cost of a Job: Paychecks\, Benefits\, and Cost of Living
DESCRIPTION:Understanding Your Paycheck & Benefits (Made Simple)— Workshop + Q&A \nJoin Financial Education in a practical workshop to decode your paycheck\, understand income taxes/withholding\, and make sense of benefits that can dramatically change your take-home pay. You’ll learn how employer and employee contributions affect the true value of an offer and when to connect with UCC for offer comparisons and negotiation guidance.\n\nThis event's information is shown in Handshake as well as on the Happening @ Michigan calendar so that it will be seen by a larger number of U-M Students. You can only register to attend this event within Handshake. If you'd like to indicate that you'll be attending this event and see more details\, please go to this webpage:https://umich.joinhandshake.com/events/1935788/share_preview   \n\nWe want to ensure full and equitable participation in our events. If an accessibility accommodation would promote your full participation in this event\, please indicate your accommodation requirements via the link below\, preferably at least 14 days prior to the program to ensure sufficient time for arranging your requested accommodation(s) or exploring suitable alternatives. If you have any questions regarding access to our programs\, please don't hesitate to reach out to Cierra Sutherland at cierrasu@umich.edu. Accessibility accommodation form: https://forms.gle/FmFn35ZLxJ8kvPfSA  #UCC
UID:147143-21900424@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147143
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:
LOCATION:Office of New Student Programs, Student Activities Building, 2038, 515 E Jefferson St, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260416T122030
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T153000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:When Publishing is Political: Social Science Writing in an Era of Political Volatility
DESCRIPTION:This event will feature a conversation between Dr. William Lopez and Dr. Alford A. Young Jr. as they explore the challenges of publishing scholarship focused on race\, immigration status\, and social policy in the current socio-political environment. The conversation will explore several key themes\, including the decision-making process for choosing writing venues\, the challenges of publishing research that elicits public opinion and backlash\, and the demands of balancing media and activism with scholarly obligations. The program will include a moderated dialogue\, followed by an audience Q&A\, in an intimate forum designed for faculty and graduate scholars engaged in anti-racist research and interested in expanding their public engagement. Lunch will be provided.\n
UID:147052-21900323@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147052
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sessions
LOCATION:Michigan Union - Parker Room
CONTACT:
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