Wrong by Nature, Wrong by Design

Jermain Kaminski is an Assistant Professor at the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University. In his research, Jermain combines methods from machine learning and natural language processing, with a specific focus on large text, audio, and video data in entrepreneurship.

In this talk, Jermain will explore why striking patterns in data don’t always mean one thing causes another. Through playful examples and machine learning insights, he will uncover how algorithms can mistake correlation for causation and what it takes to tell the difference.

Anna Sagana is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research sits at the intersection of psychology and law, examining how human judgment, memory, and decision-making operate, and fail, in high-stakes contexts such as eyewitness identification, face recognition, and expert witness evaluation in criminal proceedings.

In her talk, Anna Sagana will discuss how cognitive biases emerge in human decision-making and why our minds are, in a sense, wired for them. Drawing on concrete examples of how judgment goes astray - from eyewitness misidentification to flawed expert reasoning - she will explore both the phenomena themselves and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, showing why even well-intentioned, experienced decision-makers are far from immune.