Graduate Students Seminar

Speaker 1: Ji Li

Title

Propensity Score Methods for Reducing the Effects of Confounding in Observational Studies

Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing interest in methods based on the propensity score to reduce or eliminate the effects of confounding when using observational data. I describe 3 different propensity score methods: matching, stratification, and inverse probability of treatment weighting using the propensity score. Balance diagnostics is also described for examining whether the propensity score model has been adequately specified. Furthermore, I discuss the Covariate Balance Propensity Score which can be used to achieve global covariate balancing.

Speaker 2: Gargi Chaudhuri

Title

RSA on Mathematical Cryptography

Abstract

Cryptography, or cryptology, is a subject that is concerned with privacy or confidentiality of communication over insecure channels, in the presence of adversaries. It seeks to find ways to encrypt messages so that even if an unauthorized party gets a hold of a message, they cannot make sense out of it. The ways to break encryption systems, called cryptanalysis, is also part of the subject. The RSA encryption and decryption algorithm talks about the secrecy of messages between two users.  It involves a public key and a private key generation. The public key can be known to everyone and is used for encrypting messages. Messages encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted using the private key.  The private key is not publicly known, it is only known to the receiver so that she/he can decrypt the encrypted message. These keys (public and private keys) for the RSA algorithm are generated using some mathematical operations.