Schedule

Schedule for DS190, Capstone in Data Science, Pomona College, Fall 2025

Here is your roadmap for the semester!

• On some days, there are assignments due. Pay attention to due dates as you are graded entirely on turning in assignments on time (reasonable person test).

• You will give three presentations. Two will be ~10 minutes, informal, and take place during regular class times. The final presentation will be ~20 minutes, more formal, and take place during reading days / finals week.

• Five class periods will be based on disciplinary data science ethics. You are expected to read the pre-class materials and be an active participant in the class discussion.

• Attendance and class participation is mandatory.

date	topic	assignment	readings
Week 1 8.26.25	introductions + syllabus + logistics + pre-course survey		Introduction
Week 2 9.2.25	check-in + citations + scripting + Git	capstone topic	Writing & Presenting BibTeX example .bib file
Week 3 9.9.25	EDS - history	annotated bibliography	Clever, Iris. 2023. Biometry against Fascism: Geoffrey Morant, Race, and Anti-Racism in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology. Isis. Van Noorden, Richard. 2020. The Ethical Questions That Haunt Facial-Recognition Research. Nature. log in to the library to access the article Johnson, Thaddeus L., and Natasha N. Johnson. 2023. Police Facial Recognition Technology Cant Tell Black People Apart. Scientific American.
Week 4 9.16.25	1st presentation
Week 5 9.23.25	1st presentation
Week 6 9.30.25	EDS - linguistics	1st outline	Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,610–23. FAccT ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. Beacken, Gabrielle, and Matthias Becker. 2025. Chatbot Grok Doesn’t Glitch—It Reflects X. Tech Policy Press. Holliday, Nicole. 2025. If Not Language, Why Language-Shaped? TikTokvideo.
Week 7 10.7.25	EDS - philosophy	section draft	Johnson, G.M. 2023. Are Algorithms Value-Free? Feminist Theoretical Virtues in Machine Learning. Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2): 27-61. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-20234372 the pdf is available on Canvas!!!! Dastin, J. (2018, October 11). Insight — Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. Reuters.
10.14.25	fall break
Week 8 10.21.25	2nd presentation
Week 9 10.28.25	2nd presentation
Week 10 11.4.25	EDS - psychology	introduction or 2nd section	OGrady, Cathleen. 2024. Psychology Study Participants Recruited Online May Provide Nonsensical Answers. Science 384 (6697). Coley, R. Yates, Eric Johnson, Gregory E. Simon, Maricela Cruz, and Susan M. Shortreed. 2021. Racial/Ethnic Disparities in the Performance of Prediction Models for Death by Suicide After Mental Health Visits. JAMA Psychiatry 78 (7): 726–34.
Week 11 11.11.25	check-in	ethics component
Week 12 11.18.25	EDS - economics		E. Calvano, G. Calzolari, V. Denicolò, S. Pastor, and A. Roehm, 2020. Protecting consumers from collusive prices due to AI, Science 370 (6518), pgs 626 - 628. To access the article, go to the Claremont Colleges Library and search for the title. B. Holt, C. Szyfer, H. Steinhauer, and J. Ottenberg, 2025. Recent developments in algorithmic pricing: U.S. appeals court weighs in, enforcers stay aggressive, and open questions remain. DavisPolk, 2025. New laws regulating algorithmic pricing enacted in New York and California.
11.25.25	Thanksgiving break no class, optional one-on-one check-ins	project draft - due Monday 11/24/2025
12.2.25	some logistics
12.4.25 (1-4pm) or 12.9.25 (2-5pm)	final presentations
12.9.25	final write-up	final write-up