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Students celebrate graduation in MS data science program

Eighteen graduating master’s students from the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the ºÚÁÏÍø were congratulated recently for choosing “one of the most dynamic, exciting fields in the world today.”

Data science student Xingyu Wang (class of 2019) has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honor society for liberal arts and sciences.

A $1 million Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Army Research Office will enable assistant professor of computer science Ehsan Hoque to develop lie-detecting technology, but also explore ways to ensure it is used responsibly. ECASE awards are the highest honor bestowed by the ARO  to outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

A new research program will harness machine learning and data science to sift through tens of millions of records of U.S. nursing home and assisted living residents to identify risk factors for suicide. The project, which will bring together researchers at the Medical Center and the Goergen Institute for Data Science, is supported by a $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Since its inception in 2017, the Rochester Data Science Consortium, founded at the University, has expanded the number of member companies and created a pool of skilled data science students to assist companies on short notice.

Four grants from the Center of Excellence in Data Science are helping local companies translate the cutting-edge science of University researchers into improved health care, while also benefiting the region’s economy and creating jobs.

The ºÚÁÏÍø has been selected as a Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson's Disease Research by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The new $9.2 million award brings together researchers from industry and multiple academic institutions to focus on the development of digital tools to enhance understanding of the disease, engage broad populations in research, and accelerate the development of new treatments for Parkinson’s disease.   

High school students take a dive into data science

How has the number of movies changed over time? Which countries have produced the most feature films? Which directors’ movies are highest ranked? And who makes the longest and shortest films? There’s no shortage of this kind of information at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which stores information on nearly 500,000 feature films from all over the world. The challenge for 18 high school students attending the ºÚÁÏÍø’s summer precollege program: How to make sense of it all in a visually compelling, easily understood fashion.

Gourab Ghoshal, assistant professor in physics and astronomy, has been published in Nature Communications.  The article is titled From the betweenness centrality in street networks to structural invariants in random planar graphs.

Capstone projects: ‘A taste of the real world’

(The data science curriculum at the ºÚÁÏÍø culminates in the semester-long capstone course. It complements the more structured and traditional course work that students take earlier in their program.)

Researchers in the lab of Ehsan Hoque, an assistant professor of computer science, have created a game that has allowed them to analyze more than 1 million frames of facial expressions, the largest video dataset so far for understanding how to tell if someone is lying.

Anya Khalid came to the University without having ever coded in her life—but she was eager to get in on the ground floor of the new undergraduate major in data science.

Henry Kautz, the founding director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science, will direct the National Science Foundation division that supports artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and data science.

Academic researchers tend to specialize. John Handley, Wencheng Wu, and Beilei Xu were on Walt Johnson’s “must hire” list for exactly the opposite reason.