The Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge is an annual contest with the goal of advancing the field of visual analytics through competition. The VAST Challenge is designed to help researchers understand how their software would be used in a novel analytic task and determine if their data transformations, visualizations, and interactions would be beneficial for particular analytic tasks. VAST Challenge problems provide researchers with realistic tasks and data sets for...Read more
News
Phillipa Gill, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been named one of ...Read more
UMass Amherst, Cornell researchers team up for new analysis of bird migration data
...Read more
Aditya Shastry of India had two years of statistics experience in the finance field, the start of what would have seemed a lucrative career. But he found his work limiting; he wanted to work on his own project.
He applied to the ...Read more
With a new cluster of specialized graphics processing units (GPUs) now installed, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is poised to attract the nation’s next crop of top Ph.D. students and researchers in such fields as artificial intelligence, computer vision and natural language processing. UMass Amherst’s new GPU cluster, housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, is the result of a five-year, $5 million grant to the campus from Gov. Charlie Baker...Read more
Lexalytics, a Boston-based text analytics company with local research offices in Amherst and Hadley, has announced a new research partnership with the Center for Data Science in UMass Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS). Currently a member of the Center’s Industry...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – For the past 30 years, computer science researchers have been teaching their machines to read, for example, assigning back issues of the Wall Street Journal, so computers can learn the English they need to run search engines like Google or mine platforms like Facebook and Twitter for opinions and marketing data.
But using only standard English has left out whole segments of society who use dialects and non-standard varieties of English, and the...Read more
Antimicrobial resistance in disease-causing microbes has garnered attention in recent years, but another persistent area of drug resistance is the ability for tumors to evade chemotherapy drugs. Methotrexate is one of the oldest chemotherapy agents, and although it can be quite effective against many types of cancer and other conditions, in many cases it stops working because the patient becomes resistant to the drug's effects.
In a new study, researchers have developed a rapid,...Read more
UMass Amherst Professor and Center for Data Science Director Andrew McCallum is a keynote speaker at the 2016 Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). McCallum’s talk is entitled Structured Prediction and Deep Learning: Past, Present, and Future. This is the 32nd UAI conference which is one of the premier international conferences on research pertaining to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in...Read more
UMass Amherst Center for Data Science affiliated biostatistician, team, develop new data analytics
Communicable disease epidemics place a huge burden on public health systems around the world, and techniques for predicting outbreaks to date have not adequately addressed public health officials’ need for real-time information, say biostatistician Nicholas Reich at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-authors of a new case study of dengue hemorrhagic fever in Thailand....Read more
Andrew McGregor, Associate Professor at UMass Amherst and Sudipto Guha, Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania, will present a tutorial entitled Graph Sketching, Streaming, and Space-Efficient Optimization at the 2016 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Graph sketching is a form of dimensionality reduction for graph data that is based on using random linear projections and exploiting connections between linear...Read more
SPRINGFIELD -- MassMutual announced Friday that its MassMutual Foundation will donate $15 million to University of Massachusetts computer science programs over the next 10 years.
Of the $15 million, $12 million will support the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center for Data Science with additional faculty, a doubling of the number of available courses and an expansion of the master's degree program.
In Springfield, the company will donate $3 million over 10 years to...Read more
UMass Amherst computer scientist leads team using new techniques to handle huge data sets.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College are teaming up to apply recent advances in machine learning, specifically biologically inspired deep learning methods, to analyze large amounts of scientific data from Mars.
AMHERST — If the film "The Graduate" were being made today, the one-word piece of career advice for Dustin Hoffman's character might plausibly be "analytics" instead of "plastics."
"The real skill set now, and it is everywhere, is analytics," said Nic Wegman, executive director of the Chase Career Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Isenberg School of Management.
It's data...Read more
April 22 at the UMass Computer Science Building.Read more
Although my background is in machine learning, much of my recent work has been in the emergent field of computational social science. At a high level, computational social science is the study of social phenomena – i.e., is phenomena that occur in social processes – using digitized information and computational and statistical methods. These social processes might be anything from in-person interactions between friends all the way up to the activities of government organizations or...Read more
Assistant Professor Daniel Sheldon
I’m currently engaged in a research project sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to assess the vulnerability of road networks in Western Massachusetts to disruptions caused by extreme weather events. This is part of a larger interdisciplinary project at...Read more
This year’s Five College DataFest took place April 1-3 at the UMass Amherst campus. In total, 140 students participated in the annual event. The American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest is a nationally-coordinated undergraduate competition where small teams of students work over a weekend to extract insight from a rich and complex data set. Previous years’ data sets have included crime data from the...Read more
HOLYOKE -- An experimental, solar-powered "microdata center" called MassNZ will be unveiled beside the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center at 100 Bigelow St. Friday at 10:15 a.m.
"MassNZ reinforces Holyoke's growing reputation as a leader in green energy, a hotbed of innovation and a magnet for academic and industrial investment," Mayor Alex B. Morse said in a press release. "It will also serve as an educational asset for local high schools and community...Read more
AMHERST — These students already know the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses pretty well. They know certain buses tend to run a few minutes behind. They know that on weekend evenings, leaving downtown Amherst, they’ll have to squeeze.
And sometimes, if traveling from one spot on the University of Massachusetts campus to another, it can be faster to walk.
These are patterns they’ve gleaned from regular ridership, from taking the bus to class in the morning and home...Read more
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced the public release of the largest-ever machine learning dataset to the academic research community. With this release, the company aims to advance the field of large-scale machine learning and recommender systems, and to help level the playing field between industrial and academic research.
"Many academic researchers and data scientists don't have access to truly large-scale datasets because it is...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – Thanks to the work of computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the online database of the country’s millions of inventors and patents will be much better to navigate for innovators, business and policy makers.
A team of UMass Amherst computer scientists took the top prize in an international competition sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and U.S. Department of Commerce. They designed a computer algorithm that...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – Two University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists who are helping to shape the intellectual agenda of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Big Data Research and Development Initiative attended the first Northeast Big Data Hub workshop at Columbia University in New York City today.
Professors Beverly Woolf, co-leader of the Northeast “Big Data in Education” focus area, and Andrew McCallum, director of UMass Amherst’s Center for Data Science and a...Read more
UMass Amherst scientists link brain architecture to consciousness and abstract thought
Contact: Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444
AMHERST, Mass – Using 20 years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from tens of thousands of brain imaging experiments, computational neuroscientists Hava Siegelmann and a postdoctoral colleague at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created a geometry-based method for massive data analysis to reach a new understanding of how...Read more
The College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts is pleased to offer its first course at the university's new Boston location at One Beacon St., COMPSCI 589: Machine Learning.
This course is ideal for:
- UMass and non-UMass graduate students and advanced undergraduate students who would like to complete coursework towards their degrees
- Computer science and information technology professionals who want to build their ...Read more
By DAVE EISENSTADTER
@DaveEisen
AMHERST — Well-known businesses and organizations in Massachusetts and beyond are lavishing both time and money on the new Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The center, established earlier this year, has received more than $1.5 million worth of computer hardware, cloud computing infrastructure, data sets and research funding from companies including Amazon, Google, MassMutual, Microsoft...Read more
Alexandra Meliou, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently received a five-year, $549,996 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development award to design and develop new technologies that will assist scientists, data analysts and casual users in obtaining deeper insights about their data.
The CAREER award is one of NSF's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-...Read more
The University of Massachusetts Amherst today launched a new Center for Data Science that will coordinate and significantly expand its capacity for research, education and industry collaboration in support of the exploding demand for acquisition and analysis of “big data.”
The launch was announced at a symposium that featured an array of business leaders from organizations including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Thomson Reuters, MassMutual, Pratt and Whitney and the New England Venture...Read more
In a recent review of the various methods used to reconstruct the relationship between past sea-level rise and climate change, climate scientists including Robert DeConto of UMass Amherst say we are on the verge of understanding how quickly the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets may respond to warming, and what the rates of sea-level change might be. Writing in the current issue of Science, DeConto and colleagues at several U.S. and European universities examine how understanding...Read more
IESL has a new postdoc, Ajay Nagesh. He was a joint-PhD student of IIT Bombay and Monash University, Australia, working with Professor Ganesh Ramkrishnan and Dr. Gholamreza Haffari. His areas of interest are information extraction, computational linguistics, and machine learning. He has done internships at Xerox Research and IBM Research. He most recently presented his work at HLT in Denver (where he also met IESL alum Pallika Kanani).Read more
March 22, 2015
Professor James Allan, co-Director of the UMass Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, is collaborating with Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks on a half million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the Proteus toolset for information retrieval and visualization.
Allan is working with Northeastern Professors David Smith (adjunct UMass Amherst CS faculty), Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Maddock...Read more
