Planning is underway for the third year of the Master's Mentorship Program, scheduled for the Spring 2019 semester. This innovative program, an exclusive benefit for members of the Industry Affiliates Program, involves small teams of data science Master’s students collaborating on an industry-sponsored project. Read more
News
Mohit Iyyer joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences in September of this year. Prior to coming to UMass, Mohit was a Young Investigator at AI2, and received his PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests lie broadly in natural language processing, and using machine learning to generate language at the discourse level. Read more
CDS recruiting events and activities help companies find great talent. Here are examples of successful student-employer matches. Read more
The Center for Data Science Career Mixer was a busy and high-energy event, connecting more than 100 data science students with scientists and engineers visiting from the Center’s industry partners. Read more
The Center for Data Science is delighted to introduce our quarterly newsletter. Our goal is to help you stay connected to opportunities for recruiting, research collaboration, and faculty access. We hope you’ll find it informative and useful as you consider the many ways we can help you satisfy your hiring needs as well as conquer your university-grade research challenges. Read more
The Gypsum Compute Cluster got an upgrade this summer, more than doubling in size from 400 to now 824 GPUs (graphics processing units). Read more
Computer science researchers Deepak Ganesan and Tauhidur Rahman at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as part of a multi-institution team, have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore how work performance may be affected by shift work and disrupted circadian rhythm, the 24-hour internal body clock that cycles between sleepiness and alertness. (...Read more
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) PhD Candidates Emma Strubell and ...Read more
Raytheon Company, a technology and innovation leader in defense, civil government, and cybersecurity solutions, has joined the Industry Affiliates Program of the Center for Data Science. Read more
Voya Financial, financial services company dedicated to helping Americans plan, invest, and protect their savings, has joined the Industry Affiliates Program of the Center for Data Science. Read more
Bose Corporation, a consumer technology company dedicated to innovation and scientific inquiry, has joined the Industry Affiliates Program of the Center for Data Science (CDS). Read more
Computer science researchers Alexandra Meliou and Yuriy Brun at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have received a four-year, $1.05 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how software systems can exhibit bias and how software engineers can develop fairer, more equitable systems.
Meliou says, “Software makes decisions in what products we are led to buy, who gets a loan, self-driving car actions that may lead to property damage or human injury, medical...Read more
What would the world be like if cryptocurrency millionaires could share some of their wealth with impoverished villages in Nigeria?
Jim Flynn, a Northampton resident and lifelong innovator, wants to find out.
An entrepreneur in residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Flynn has been working on an ambitious project to employ data science to create a free and open system of distribution for a universal basic income -- UBI.
How does one do that,...Read more
The Kuwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a decentralized identity platform, has joined the Industry Affiliates Program of the Center for Data Science (CDS). Along with five graduate students from the College of Information and Computer Sciences, the Kuwa Foundation (...Read more
Erik Learned-Miller, professor of computer science, recently received a four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to support fundamental research that he says will be “especially open to creative approaches” in the quest to build “visual common sense” into computers and robotic assistants. He will lead the multi-institution DARPA project, part of its Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program, which is expected to bring about $1.6 million to the campus....Read more
We are happy to announce an upgrade of the Gypsum GPU compute cluster. 53 new nodes have been added with eight GPU’s per new node, for a total of 424 new GPUs.
The new GPUs are NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards. They each have 11GB of memory and have similar performance to the TitanX cards that are already part of the cluster.
Two new queues have been added to access...Read more
Su Lin Blodgett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Massachusetts, recently presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics in Melbourne, Australia. Her research is focused on improving English language parsing tools relating to words, phrases, and alternate spellings used by millions of African American on social media.
Current Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools “learn” and are trained on mainstream American...Read more
The interior of the Fitbit office at the Boston waterfront has the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up - open workspaces, a ping-pong table, multiple couches, and a fully-stocked snack bar with free chips, candy, roasted almonds, single-serve juices, and a keg. When a team of CDS (Center for Data Science) students and staff arrived in early May, sunlight streamed in from tall windows on three sides of the open office space.
Brant Cheikes, Executive Director of the CDS,...Read more
Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science in UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, was appointed Distinguished Professor following approval by the Board of Trustees at its June 20 meeting.
The title Distinguished Professor is conferred on select, highly accomplished faculty who have already achieved the rank of professor and who meet a demanding set of qualifications.
In their letter of nomination, Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and...Read more
Shlomo Zilberstein & the UMass Resource Bounded Reasoning Lab
Artificial intelligence used to be about teaching machines to fit in with humans. Now, it’s all about collaboration, according to Shlomo Zilberstein of University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Center for Data Science (CDS).
...Read more
Computer science was born of a rebellious, hacker culture, a spirit that lives on in the publishing culture of artificial intelligence (AI). The burgeoning field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets—sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal. As of 15 May, about 3000 people, mostly academic computer scientists, had signed a petition promising not to submit, review, or...Read more
Computer science graduate students Haw-Shiuan Chang, Amol Agrawal, Ananya Ganesh, Anirudha Desai and Vinayak Mathur, with professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science, and Alfred Hough, lead artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Lexalytics Inc. of Boston, presented a paper at the annual conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies on June 6 in New Orleans.
Chang delivered the...Read more
After three semesters studying computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), recently graduated master’s student Ankur Aggarwal has secured a bright future with a job at Google’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
...Read more
There are many unanswered questions regarding data in the natural sciences, especially those related to ecology and conservation. Daniel Sheldon and his team at the Machine Learning for Data Science (MLDS) lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences’ (CICS) Center for Data Science (CDS) are working to answer those questions at the intersection of data science and conservation.
Within the lab, ...Read more
The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Data Science (CDS) November Career Mixer has already worked its magic, according to student Kristin Lieber, recently hired by Microsoft shortly after meeting company representatives at the event.
Lieber, who will receive her master’s degree in statistics this May, knew that her background in statistics would fit perfectly with the growing opportunities available in data science.
“The data...Read more
For soon-to-be college graduates in data science deciding whether to pursue a master’s degree or enter their field full-time, the MassMutual Data Science Development Program (DSDP) makes it possible to have their cake and eat it too.
The Amherst-based program develops promising data scientists by supporting their pursuit of a master’s degree while providing hands-on training from experts in...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – The Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been selected by IBM to join the company’s AI Horizons Network, an international consortium of leading universities working with IBM to develop technologies needed to help fulfill the promise of artificial intelligence (AI). The collaboration builds on the international reputation of the University’s College of Information and Computer Sciences as a research leader in artificial...Read more
Taking the traditional career fair to a higher echelon, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Data Science (CDS) hosted students and industry representatives at the third annual Data Science Career Mixer on Nov. 2.
This year’s event saw a significant increase in both student and industry registration, with over 100 students and 23 companies participating. Held in the Campus Center Auditorium and catered by UMass Dining, the evening included...Read more
Computable Knowledge project will harness artificial intelligence to enable breakthroughs in scientific research and development
AMHERST, Mass. – Distinguished scientist and professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will lead a new partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to accelerate science and medicine. The goal of this project, called Computable Knowledge, is to create an intelligent and navigable...Read more
The new iPhone X knows your face.
You don’t need a passcode or fingerprint to unlock it. Through the wonders of face recognition, you just hold the screen up to your face and you’re in. You may be awed at the split-second accuracy of the iPhone X’s ability, but Erik Learned-Miller, a professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst, saw this coming a...Read more
Postdoctoral research fellow Brittany Johnson wants to make engineered software more equitable through her research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Johnson joined the College of Information and Computer Science’s (CICS) Center for Data Science (CDS) to improve software developer productivity. She works at the Laboratory for Advanced Software...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – Andrew McCallum, computer science professor and director of the Center for Data Science in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for “contributions to machine learning with structured data and innovations in scientific communication.”
McCallum is one of just 54 new ACM Fellows, representing 1 percent of the association’s...Read more
Nearly 50 Five College researchers, entrepreneurs, and leaders of local businesses and institutions convened for an evening of dining and networking at AmherstWorks on Tuesday, Oct. 24, an event sponsored by MassMutual and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for Data Science.
...Read more
Honeybees are dying at an alarming rate. Six University of Massachusetts Amherst engineering students are using their senior design project to develop a system that makes beekeeping easier for commercial and hobbyist beekeepers.
Virginia Ng, Benjamin Palazzi, Manali Palwankar, Max Aukshunas, Amy Morin and Phuoc Truong are designing a honeybee...Read more
AMHERST, Mass. – One of the newest, most challenging problems facing experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is called “explainability,” says David Jensen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. However, it’s a problem he is delighted to have because it means that machine learning systems can now learn such complex models of the world that the scientists who wrote them have a tough time understanding what the machines have learned.
He says, “...Read more
Abhinav Parate and Akshaya Shanmugam co-founded Lumme Labs to develop products that learn people’s baseline health and habits in order to predict disease and offer recommendations for healthier living.
...Read more
AMHERST, MASS. – The University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) is utilizing an unprecedented $15 million gift from the MassMutual Foundation to grow the College’s data science faculty.
The gift, one of the largest donations in the university’s history, will fund eight of the 14 tenure-track faculty the college’s Center for Data Science plans to hire over the next five years. Two assistant professors were hired in the fall of...Read more
In recent years, research efforts such as the Materials Genome Initiative and the Materials Project have produced a wealth of computational tools for designing new materials useful for a range of applications, from energy and electronics to aeronautics and civil engineering.
But developing processes for producing those materials has continued to depend on a combination of experience, intuition, and manual literature reviews.
A team of researchers...Read more
This news-reading AI could scan for police shootings nationwide
Posted Sep 23, 2017 by Devin Coldewey
Ask how many people have been killed in the last couple decades by police officers, and results vary widely. Local and federal authorities may track them differently, likewise activist and research groups. One project hopes to keep better tabs on police-related fatalities...Read more
The UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences’ Accomplishments in Search & Mining Award recognizes CICS doctoral students who have research achievements in the broad areas of search and text mining. This award was created by industry sponsors to acknowledge our college’s distinguished reputation in these two areas. The recipients are chosen by a CICS faculty committee.
The 2017 CICS Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards are sponsored by ...Read more
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
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
Center for Data Science Research Symposium highlights innovative research and industry collaboration
Over 160 people from industry, higher education and the student population attended the 2nd Annual Center for Data Science Research Symposium on Thursday, April 27. Seventy-three of those in attendance were members from industry representing 45 companies.
The morning was framed with lightning talks, spotlighting contributions from Google, NVidia, Dell-EMC, and others, along with faculty members describing their industry-sponsored research. Networking sessions were...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
...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.
10-Year, $15 Million Grant Aimed at Driving Education, Economic Opportunity in Western Massachusetts
The MassMutual Foundation, Inc.—a dedicated corporate foundation established by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual)—today announced it is providing the University of Massachusetts Amherst $15 million over 10 years to further strengthen its world-class data science and cybersecurity research and education programs in Western Massachusetts.
The grant...Read more
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
The UMass Amherst Center for Data Science announced four new courses towards the College of Information and Computer Sciences graduate concentration in data science, expanding the education and training opportunities for students and professionals looking to become data scientists. These include:
CMPSCI 590D: Algorithms for Data Science
CMPSCI 590S: Systems for Data Science
CMPSCI 590V: Data Visualization and Exploration
...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
