Shaowen Wang
An Extreme-Scale Computational Approach to Redistricting Optimization
(jp5)May 2013 - Jul 2015
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2015
Blue Waters Symposium 2015, May 13, 2015
Shaowen Wang: An Extreme-Scale Computational Approach to Redistricting Optimization
Blue Waters Symposium 2014, May 15, 2014
Supercomputers vs. gerrymandering: Data could be the next key to creating fair state voting districts
Apr 10, 2017
For nearly as long as the Unites States has existed there have been partisan hacks trying to draw up voting districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over the other. Though judges acknowledge that this partisan gerrymandering occurs, and that it can be unconstitutional, there’s hasn't yet been a definitive way for them to decide whether a district has been egregiously engineered to politically neuter voters of an opposing party. Indeed, as recently as 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that measuring how much political influence on redistricting is too much is an “unanswerable question.” But thanks to the power of algorithms and the latest supercomputing powers, new methods are arising that can help answer this unanswerable question. These methods played a role in November in convincing a three-judge panel to invalidate Wisconsin’s district assembly maps. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a final ruling this fall, and if the decision is upheld it would be a victory for political and social scientists, and it may finally give judges reliable methodologies to help decide if voting districts have been unfairly drawn.
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How to Quantify (and Fight) Gerrymandering
Apr 4, 2017
Partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing voting districts to give one political party an unfair edge — is one of the few political issues that voters of all stripes find common cause in condemning. Voters should choose their elected officials, the thinking goes, rather than elected officials choosing their voters. The Supreme Court agrees, at least in theory: In 1986 it ruled that partisan gerrymandering, if extreme enough, is unconstitutional. Yet in that same ruling, the court declined to strike down two Indiana maps under consideration, even though both “used every trick in the book,” according to a paper in the University of Chicago Law Review. And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. “If you’re never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that’s unconstitutional?” said Wendy K. Tam Cho, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Blue Waters Symposium a success
May 28, 2014
The symposium, held May 13-15 in Champaign, Ill., gathered many of the country’s leading supercomputer users to share what they have learned using Blue Waters and discuss the future of supercomputing. On May 13, 2014, Blue Waters supercomputer users and many of the NCSA staff who support their work converged in Champaign, Ill., for the second annual Blue Waters Symposium. The ensuing three days were filled with what many of them would later refer to as a wonderful variety of science talks and opportunities for networking and collaboration.
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22 Illinois projects receive time on Blue Waters
Jun 11, 2013
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has awarded access to the Blue Waters supercomputer—which is capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and of working with quadrillions of bytes of data—to 22 campus research teams from a wide range of disciplines. The computing and data capabilities of Blue Waters, which is operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), will assist researchers in their work on understanding DNA, developing biofuels, simulating climate, and more.
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