Brian Kundinger, a member of the second cohort of Sloan Scholars, has received a Google Ph.D. Fellowship to support his research.
Kundinger, who came to Duke in fall 2019, is pursuing his Ph.D. in Statistical Science under the tutelage of Assistant Professor Rebecca Steorts. He is interested in developing advanced mathematical tools to address complex problems in public policy and social sciences.
The Google Ph.D. Fellowship provides three years of funding to support recipients’ research. The fellowship program recognizes outstanding graduate students who are doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields and are looking to influence the future of technology.
Kundinger’s fellowship will support his research on record linkage, the task of identifying duplicate records across separate data files. This process is straightforward when we have unique identifiers or exact information. It becomes difficult, however, when data files have many errors, and it is computationally burdensome when applied to large datasets.
Record linkage is routinely used throughout the business, government, and non-profit sectors, and has found surprising applications in the study of human rights abuses. Kundinger’s particular research focuses on developing 1) fast, scalable methods for record linkage that accurately quantify uncertainty of the linkage process, and 2) algorithmically fair methods for use in situations when rates of matching and data reliability differ throughout a population.
