NSF Award
2310950
From March 12-14, 2023, the Data Institute at the University of San Francisco (USF) will host its third biennial Data Institute Conference at the downtown campus in San Francisco. The recent explosion of available data has fundamentally changed the way researchers across disciplines approach problems. Industry is experiencing a similar disruption as data driven decision-making is driving innovation toward new skills and roles in data science. While academic researchers have traditionally been the center of innovation and research, industry is pouring significant resources into developing solutions to many of these same problems. The Data Institute Conference will draw leaders from industry and academia to explore the latest theoretical advances and technological applications in data science. The conference aims to promote the next generation of cross-disciplinary research and offers educational and professional development opportunities to early-career data scientists from diverse backgrounds. The conference is designed to launch new research collaborations among academics and to build bridges between academia and advanced research groups from Bay Area industry and beyond. This conference will make an equally important impact to the greater scientific community with a focus on recruiting and increasing diversity in data science, with attendees who are not traditionally represented in STEM fields. <br/> <br/>Data science is a rapidly developing field with fluid boundaries but largely contains research areas from the statistical, mathematical, and computational sciences. This conference will bring together both junior and senior researchers from industry and academia to exchange ideas from recent advances to data science. There will be several invited and contributed talk tracks, including one in network analysis at which speakers will address many important questions on the estimation of graphical models, inference related to graphs, and applications of networks to neuroscience. Other tracks include practical issues and advances in experimentation and A/B testing; applications of machine learning to sports analytics; and precision healthcare. There will also be tracks devoted to the discussion of the societal impact of data science, including tracks on data privacy and artificial intelligence, the application of data science to public policy, and a panel discussion on data and algorithmic ethics. Most conferences in this space have attendees numbering in the thousands and are either very broad with dozens of parallel sessions or focused on a single topic in data science. Addressing the clear need of such a conference, the Data Institute conference will be of moderate size (250), with up to three parallel sessions at any given time to maximize interchanges between participants. For more information about the Data Institute Conference, please visit the following website: https://dsco.usfdatainstitute.org<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
