*What*: Abraham Flaxman - Measuring mortality rates in Iraq: Technologies for generating credible estimates of deaths caused by the 2003-2011 war and occupation *When:* Tuesday, May 6th at 12pm *Where:* The Allen Center, CSE 203 Please join us Tuesday for another exciting Change Seminar. Abie Flaxman from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation will be talking about recent work on methods for estimating the mortality rate in Iraq. *Abstract:* Over the last 4 years, I helped a team of doctors and epidemiologists to measure the number of deaths cause directly and indirectly by the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Producing this estimate turned out to be technically challenging and politically controversial, as I expected. In this talk, I will describe some of the math, stats, and computer science for producing such a quantity and for making it stick. *About the speaker:* Abraham Flaxman, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is the research lead for the Computational Algorithms research team. Dr Flaxman is the primary architect of a software tool known as DisMod-MR that IHME is using to estimate the Global Burden of Disease. He and other researchers use the tool to fill in gaps in incomplete data on stroke, malaria, depression, and other diseases from government records and surveys and to correct for inconsistencies.