While summertime research efforts continue, everyone is actively planning to resume in-person campus life at UMass Amherst by the time the fall semester starts on September 1. The Center for Data Science (CDS) team will begin transitioning back to our campus workspaces very soon. I’m hopeful and optimistic that we will be able to safely restart the many face-to-face activities, programs, and collaborations that make the College of Information and Computer Sciences an intellectually stimulating environment for data science research, teaching, and learning. Read more

Soon the Spring 2021 semester will be in the rearview mirror. The pandemic has been challenging, yet we are feeling optimistic as conditions improve. We are grateful for our campus community rising to the challenge, adhering to masking and social distancing policies, and keeping COVID-19 testing rates high and positivity rates low. Every day, more of us are receiving our vaccines and becoming “activated” against the threat. Planning for the Fall 2021 semester has begun, and the campus has announced that in person operations will largely resume. Read more

Assistant Professor Laure Thompson joined CICS in the fall of 2020, after completing her doctoral degree in computer science at Cornell University, where she was advised by David Mimno (CICS '15PhD). Laure talked with us about her research focus and how it applies to industry. Read more

Yair Zick joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) as an assistant professor last month, after four years as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. He was interested in joining UMass CICS because he found a group of faculty members already working on topics that he cares about, namely EQUATE (Equity, Accountability, Trust, and Explainability). One of Zick’s research interests is algorithmic fairness, particularly the allocation of public resources. Read more

Once again this summer, teams of graduate students participated in the center’s Data Science for the Common Good (DS4CG) program and tackled a variety of interesting and challenging data science problems. Working remotely proved no hindrance to the teams’ abilities to deliver quality analysis and insight for our partners. CDS is grateful to our industry affiliates, who provided volunteer professional data scientists to advise our teams throughout the summer. It was a great opportunity for our industry partners to participate in common good projects while being exposed to domains and data science problems outside the normal scope of their day-to-day business problems. Read more

UMass College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Professor Erik Learned-Miller recently co-authored a white paper calling for a new federal authority to regulate facial recognition technology. On July 15, Learned-Miller held a Q&A session on the topic of facial recognition and regulation, attended by 160 participants from academia, industry, and government.  The session was the first in the CICS Technology and Social Justice webinar series, which will “explore how computing innovation intersects with vitally important issues such as structural bias, civic participation, economic inequality, and citizen privacy,” according to CICS Dean Laura Haas, who hosted the session. Read more

It’s early July in Amherst. Except for a few brief campus visits to collect papers and check mail, my students and I have worked remotely since mid-March. The shift to fully online work was awkward at first but now feels routine. In many ways we feel closer and more connected than ever before, as video conferencing provides a window into each other’s lives. Even so, I will be thrilled when the days no longer begin and end with news about the pandemic. Read more

​Brittany Johnson joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) in 2017 as the first fellow in the CDS postdoctoral fellowship program after completing her PhD in computer science at North Carolina State University. Working with Associate Professor Yuriy Brun, Johnson has spent the past three years developing Causal Testing, a new technique that helps developers understand the root causes of software bugs. Read more

Community nonprofits often collect or have access to large amounts of data, but lack the staffing, resources, and expertise to analyze and make sense of it. The Data Science WAV (Wrangle, Analyze, Visualize) project aims to address this issue. DSC-WAV is a National Science Foundation-funded project with two goals: to address the inability of community-based and nonprofit organizations to tackle data science problems, and to give real-world experience to undergraduate students studying data science. Read more

This summer, nine UMass Amherst graduate students will put their data science skills and experience to work helping organizations measure their carbon footprint, detect misinformation in public forums, analyze healthcare data on veterans, and automatically identify objects in images. The nine fellows participating in the Data Science for the Common Good (DS4CG) program, administered by the Center for Data Science (CDS), hail from diverse backgrounds, but all are passionate about using their skills for the public good. Read more

​Tom Bernardin joined the Center for Data Science (CDS) in March as Senior Data Scientist. In this new position for the center, Tom will be working to bridge  the gap between the data science needs of potential partners, such as companies and university departments, and the data science resources in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS). Tom received his PhD in economics from UMass Amherst in 2013, focusing his research on the relationship between mortgage securities and home prices during the 2008 financial crisis. After completing his degree, Tom took a faculty position teaching economics and statistics at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, wherehe mentored students on data science research projects such as predicting patient readmissions to hospitals. Tom has also worked for industry on projects ranging from predictive modeling on patient payments of hospital bills, to modeling alternative data to gain insights on the performance of financial markets. Read more

As an undergraduate math major at Lewis & Clark College, Katie Keith incorporated as much computer science and economics into her studies as she could, including doing the programming for a simulation study run by a Lewis & Clark economist. This experience opened her eyes to the connections between social science and computer science. Tying in her experience with language--she minored in Chinese and spent a year teaching English in Taiwan--Katie decided that her focus for graduate school would be studying human behavior through language. After being accepted into the doctoral program at UMass Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences, she immediately began working with Assistant Professor Brendan O’Connor, doing research in the fields of computational social science and computational text analysis. Read more

When I wrote to you last December, CDS was winding down a highly successful Fall 2019 semester. We reported a slew of faculty accomplishments, new corporate members of our Industry Affiliates Program, and plans for both the Data Science Research Symposium and the summer run of Data Science for the Common Good (DS4CG). All that energy and momentum carried over into the Spring 2020 semester. A new round of faculty recruiting kicked into high gear, with nine searches running in parallel. Our Industry Mentorship Program launched with a cohort of more than 70 master’s students tackling twenty-two company-defined team projects. We announced two wonderful keynote speakers for our Symposium (Susan Dumais, Director of Microsoft Research for New York, New England, and Montreal; and Professor Erik Learned-Miller of UMass CICS) and had a diverse technical program well in development. We were in discussions with over nine prospective DS4CG partners, and had received significant financial sponsorship for the program from MassMutual. We hired the Center’s first Senior Data Scientist to help us connect more strongly with industry partners. 

Then, in the space of a few days, everything changed.

 Read more

When you apply for a credit card or a mortgage, who or what is behind the decision-making process that approves or denies your application? Increasingly, banks are using software algorithms to make decisions like these. But how fair are the algorithms? Will you be approved because of your stellar credit score, or declined because of the zip code you live in? Read more

Przemyslaw Grabowicz joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences as a Research Assistant Professor at the end of 2018. Before coming to UMass he completed a master’s degree in applied physics from the Warsaw University of Technology, and a PhD in interdisciplinary physics from the University of Balearic Islands. He was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany. Read more

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a collaborative team led by Andrew McGregor, computer science, a three-year, $1.5 million grant to further develop the foundations of data science in a project that will create NSF’s national TRIPODS Institute for Theoretical Foundations of Data Science. Read more

On October 21, UMass Amherst Vice Chancellor of Research and Engagement Michael Malone addressed a room of 65 people who had gathered to hear about Data Science for the Common Good (DS4CG), a summer program administered by the Center for Data Science. He shared the second goal in the university’s  strategic plan: Establish UMass Amherst as a partner of choice in advancing and applying knowledge and innovation for the betterment of society. “There is no more fitting example of this than Data Science for the Common Good,” Malone said. Read more

This summer, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) staff in Massachusetts partnered with data science graduate students at the College of Information and Computer Sciences’ (CICS) Center for Data Science to enlist the power of data science to address the problem of thousands of motor vehicle accidents caused by collisions with wildlife. Read more

Classes resumed on September 3rd, and the Commonwealth’s flagship campus is again humming with energy and activity. The incoming undergraduate class is the largest in the University’s history, hailing from 45 states and 61 countries. Read more

The Center for Data Science (CDS) has an impressive track record of connecting data science students to jobs with Industry Affiliate Program (IAP) members. Read more

UMass Amherst was proud to be awarded the SPAIG (Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government) award “for fostering a diverse and inclusive community around statistics and data science that celebrates academic research, excellence in higher education, and innovative data-driven solutions.” Read more

College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Research Assistant Professor Mohammad Hajiesmailihas received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project to optimize data center energy procurement using machine learning. Read more

Katie House, a College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) master’s student, has been concerned about the issue of gun violence since she was a child. She is also passionate about data science, and at TechTogether Boston, Boston’s largest all-female and non-binary hackathon, she had the opportunity to merge the two. Read more

I’m pleased to share another edition of CDS news and events, significant faculty and student achievements, and noteworthy research that is relevant to your organization’s business and mission. Read more

UMass Center for Data Science professor Benjamin Marlin has received a three-year, $250,000 National Science Foundation grant from its Computer and Information Science and Engineering Community Research Infrastructure program to develop mResearch, a platform for reproducible and extensible research in mobile health. Read more

UMass College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) professors Yuriy Brun and Alexandra Meliou have received a $100,000 gift from Oracle Labs to support their work on software fairness, focusing on testing software for bias using an automated test generation technique. Read more

How do you bring together art, architecture, biology, engineering, computer science, the humanities, and more? The answer may very well be: through virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR). The VR/AR Working Group, formed by biology professor Duncan Irschick and sponsored by the Center for Data Science, brings together faculty, students, and other interested individuals, from within and beyond campus and across many disciplines, to talk and learn about virtual reality and augmented reality. Read more

Can you train health scientists, social scientists, and business professionals to look at their discipline through a computational lens? The College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) believes the answer is “Yes,” and that doing so can benefit other disciplines, as well as humanity at large. Read more

​We received great feedback on December’s inaugural newsletter! It’s clear that you appreciate being informed about Center news and events, significant faculty and student achievements, and noteworthy research that is relevant to your organization’s business and mission. I’m delighted to continue the conversation! Although only three months have elapsed since the last newsletter, I have plenty of updates to share with you. Read more

Thanks to new computing infrastructure acquired by CDS, Professor David Jensen and his research team are proceeding with a project to improve the supply chain of a major aerospace manufacturer. Aerospace manufacturing is extremely expensive, time-consuming, and complex. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to predict what manufacturing processes are needed and when? Helping to optimize the supply chain in this way is the work of Jensen and his team of computer science graduate students, in a project sponsored by a CDS partner company. Read more

Quantiphi, Inc., a Massachusetts-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) software and services company, has joined the Industry Affiliates Program of the Center for Data Science. Read more

Andrew McCallum and Akshay Krishnamurthy have received a four-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study new ways to use machine learning for automatically grouping massive numbers of objects based on similarities, also known as extreme clustering. Read more

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ...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

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

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

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

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

​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

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. – 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

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

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