Howard Friedman | |
---|---|
Born | Howard Steven Friedman June 10, 1972 New York City |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Scientist |
Employer(s) | United Nations Columbia University |
Howard Steven Friedman (born June 10, 1972) is an American statistician, data scientist, health economist, and writer who teaches at Columbia University [1]
Friedman is known for his role as a lead modeler on a number of public sector and private sector projects and for his publications in the fields of statistics, data science and health economics.
Friedman received a master's in statistics in 1998 and PhD in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1999. His thesis work focused on neural representations of object color through neurophysiological records of awake, behaving monkeys. This research leveraged a visual phenomenon known as Troxler's fading which is related to the phenomena of color filling-in to explore how object color is represented in the visual cortex. He has also contributed to areas of changepoint detection as it applies to neurophysiology.
Friedman was awarded a number of awards during his undergraduate and graduate career including the National Merit Scholarship, Whitaker Foundation Fellowship [2] and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship NSF-GRF
Friedman took a position as a director at Capital One where he led teams of statisticians, analysts and programmers in various areas of operations and marketing. He left Capital One to form Analytic Solutions LLC in 2003 which provided consulting services in areas of designing, developing and modeling data and served as Chief Data Scientist for DataMed Solutions LLC and Sygeny LLC. He also guided start-up companies and private equity firms in a diverse set of industries.
He has worked with the United Nations where he led a large number of research projects related to data analytics and health economics. He is credited with being the lead developer of the Integrated Health Model (used for costing the Health-related Millennium Development Goals within UNDP) and the Reproductive Health Costing Tool in UNFPA [3] He is a lead scientist for the interagency collaboration among UNICEF, World Bank, World Health Organization, UNFPA, UNAIDS and UNDP for the development of the OneHealth Tool, a project sponsored by the IHP+. [4] In 2014, he was a Visiting Researcher at Oxford University's Department of Economics.
Friedman is the author of over 100 scientific articles and book chapters in areas of applied statistics, health economics and politics and has created data science courses using R, Python, SQL and SAS software.
In addition to his scientific career, Friedman is an accomplished artist [5] [6] and writer. His formal art training was at both Binghamton University and the School of Visual Arts. In his doctoral thesis, he quoted both Ozymandias and Angels and Stardust in the preface. His paintings have been displayed in a number of New York City venues.
In June 2012, Prometheus Books released his book Measure of a Nation. This book focuses on how to improve America by first comparing its performance with thirteen competitive industrial nations, then identifying the best practices found throughout the world that can be adopted here in the United States. Measure of a Nation was named by Jared Diamond as the best book of 2012 in an interview [7] published in the New York Times.
In 2020, the University of California Press published Ultimate Price, a book that examines how human life is valued which was translated into numerous languages and featured on National Public Radio. His 2024 book, Winning with Data Science was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
He has published textbooks on applied data science including 'Establishing Causal Inferences: Propensity Score Matching, Heckman's Two-Stage Model, Interrupted Time Series, and Regression Discontinuity Models', 'Propensity Score Matching, Adjustment, and Randomized Experiments', and 'Strategic Thinking with Data'
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.
A set of primary colors or primary colours consists of colorants or colored lights that can be mixed in varying amounts to produce a gamut of colors. This is the essential method used to create the perception of a broad range of colors in, e.g., electronic displays, color printing, and paintings. Perceptions associated with a given combination of primary colors can be predicted by an appropriate mixing model that reflects the physics of how light interacts with physical media, and ultimately the retina. The most common color mixing models are the additive primary colors and the subtractive primary colors. Red, yellow and blue are also commonly taught as primary colours, despite some criticism due to its lack of scientific basis.
In colorimetry, the Munsell color system is a color space that specifies colors based on three properties of color: hue, value (lightness), and chroma. It was created by Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th century and adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the official color system for soil research in the 1930s.
The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. The binding problem refers to the overall encoding of our brain circuits for the combination of decisions, actions, and perception. It is considered a "problem" due to the fact that no complete model exists.
In color science, a color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or color components. When this model is associated with a precise description of how the components are to be interpreted, taking account of visual perception, the resulting set of colors is called "color space."
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
Robert Goldstone is a Distinguished Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research interests include concept learning and representation, perceptual learning, collective behavior, and computational modeling of human cognition. He has developed and empirically tested neural network models that simultaneously learn new perceptual and conceptual representations, with the learned concepts both affecting and being affected by perception. He has also developed computational models of how groups of people compete for resources, cooperate to solve problems, exchange information and innovations, and form coalitions.
Systems ecology is an interdisciplinary field of ecology, a subset of Earth system science, that takes a holistic approach to the study of ecological systems, especially ecosystems. Systems ecology can be seen as an application of general systems theory to ecology. Central to the systems ecology approach is the idea that an ecosystem is a complex system exhibiting emergent properties. Systems ecology focuses on interactions and transactions within and between biological and ecological systems, and is especially concerned with the way the functioning of ecosystems can be influenced by human interventions. It uses and extends concepts from thermodynamics and develops other macroscopic descriptions of complex systems.
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience. Contrary to its name, Cartesian materialism is not a view that was held by or formulated by René Descartes, who subscribed rather to a form of substance dualism.
The permanent income hypothesis (PIH) is a model in the field of economics to explain the formation of consumption patterns. It suggests consumption patterns are formed from future expectations and consumption smoothing. The theory was developed by Milton Friedman and published in his A Theory of the Consumption Function, published in 1957 and subsequently formalized by Robert Hall in a rational expectations model. Originally applied to consumption and income, the process of future expectations is thought to influence other phenomena. In its simplest form, the hypothesis states changes in permanent income, rather than changes in temporary income, are what drive changes in consumption.
Kenneth Noble Stevens was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and professor of health sciences and technology at the research laboratory of electronics at MIT. Stevens was head of the speech communication group in MIT's research laboratory of electronics (RLE), and was one of the world's leading scientists in acoustic phonetics.
In vision, filling-in phenomena are those responsible for the completion of missing information across the physiological blind spot, and across natural and artificial scotomata. There is also evidence for similar mechanisms of completion in normal visual analysis. Classical demonstrations of perceptual filling-in involve filling in at the blind spot in monocular vision, and images stabilized on the retina either by means of special lenses, or under certain conditions of steady fixation. For example, naturally in monocular vision at the physiological blind spot, the percept is not a hole in the visual field, but the content is “filled-in” based on information from the surrounding visual field. When a textured stimulus is presented centered on but extending beyond the region of the blind spot, a continuous texture is perceived. This partially inferred percept is paradoxically considered more reliable than a percept based on external input..
Jeffrey M. Friedman is a molecular geneticist at New York City's Rockefeller University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His discovery of the hormone leptin and its role in regulating body weight has had a major role in the area of human obesity. Friedman is a physician scientist studying the genetic mechanisms that regulate body weight. His research on various aspects of obesity received national attention in late 1994, when it was announced that he and his colleagues had isolated the mouse ob gene and its human homologue. They subsequently found that injections of the encoded protein, leptin, decreases body weight of mice by reducing food intake and increasing energy expenditure. Current research is aimed at understanding the genetic basis of obesity in human and the mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal.
Quantitative analysis of behavior is the application of mathematical models--conceptualized from the robust corpus of environment-behavior-consequence interactions in published behavioral science--to the experimental analysis of behavior. The aim is to describe and/or predict relations between varying levels of independent environmental variables and dependent behavioral variables. The parameters in the models hopefully have theoretical meaning beyond their use in fitting models to data. The field was founded by Richard Herrnstein (1961) when he introduced the matching law to quantify the behavior of organisms working on concurrent schedules of reinforcement.
The Coloroid Color System is a color space developed between 1962 and 1980 by Antal Nemcsics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics for use by "architects and visual constructors". Since August 2000, the Coloroid has been registered as Hungarian Standard MSZ 7300.
The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.
Philip Kellman is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the current Cognitive Area Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also Adjunct Professor of Surgery in the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine, and the founder of Insight Learning Technology, Inc, a company that applies perceptual learning, adaptive learning technology, and principles from cognitive science research to improve education and training. His research interests involve perception and visual cognition, specifically visual perception of objects, shape, space, and motion, and perceptual development. He is also an expert in perceptual learning, adaptive learning, and their applications to skill acquisition and educational technology.
Russell L. De Valois was an American scientist recognized for his pioneering research on spatial and color vision.
Omari Holmes Swinton is an American economist who is chair of the Economics department at Howard University and a former president of the National Economic Association.
Eduardo Jose Chichilnisky is an Argentine-born neurobiologist and academic. He has worked at Stanford University since 2013, and serves as John R. Adler Professor of Neurosurgery.