ICS Professors Daniel Epstein, Mohsen Imani and Tianchen Qian discuss their research and the technological developments they expect in the coming year.

The new year starts with healthcare front and center, as COVID-19 continues to impact people’s daily lives. Throughout the pandemic, the fields of computer science, informatics and statistics have all played an important role in helping people move their lives online, stay connected, and analyze vast amounts of data for informed decision making. How will these fields continue to advance virtual and augmented spaces, find new ways to bring people together, and improve healthcare analytics and interventions in the coming year?

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Women have been historically underrepresented in STEM, and that trend continues today — the Pew Research Center found that women make up 25% of computing occupations and girls make up approximately 30% of AP Computer Science test-takers. Girls and women face a number of challenges in the STEM field, which is why UCI’s Master of Data Science program aims to make STEM more accessible to underrepresented groups.

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Stephan Mandt, an assistant professor of computer science and statistics in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), received an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Disney Research Los Angeles to support his work on generative modeling.

Mandt is exploring how to use machine learning under resource constraints — in particular, given a lack of relevant training data. “In other words, how might you train a deep learning algorithm to mimic speech when you don’t have massive amounts of available speech recordings?”

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A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine has published a new guide for statistical analysis in neuroscience research. Faculty from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and from the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) in the School of Medicine (SOM) collaborated on the paper, “Beyond T-Test and ANOVA: Applications of Mixed-Effects Models for More Rigorous Statistical Analysis in Neuroscience Research,” published Nov. 15, 2021 in Neuron. The paper provides a readable primer to neuroscience experimentalists who do not have extensive or up-to-date training in statistics.

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Tianyu Pan, a statistics Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), recently won two competitive awards. Pan was one of 16 students worldwide to receive the 2021 Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award and one of five U.S. recipients of the 2021 IBM Student Research Award from the New England Statistical Society.

The first award provides funds for travel to any IMS-sponsored or co-sponsored meeting, while the second award offers recipients the opportunity to present their work at the New England Statistics Symposium.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently awarded $16 million to five research projects developing artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to enable greater scientific insight and new discoveries. “Disruptive technology changes are occurring across science applications, algorithms, architectures, and high-performance computing ecosystems,” said Barbara Helland, the DOE Office of Science’s associate director for advanced scientific computing research. “These projects explore potentially high-impact approaches in AI and machine learning to assist and automate scientific discovery and data analysis for increasingly complex problems.”

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When Statistics Professor Babak Shahbaba took over as director of the Data Science Initiative, coordinating UCI faculty and students involved in data science activities, the plan was to broaden the initiative’s reach in terms of education, research and external relations. This plan motivated the creation of the Californian Data Experience Transformation (CADET) program, which aims to offer data science training via curriculum development, hands-on experiences, and close interactions with both academic and non-academic organizations.

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This summer, Professor Emerita Jessica Utts of UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) was recognized with two prestigious awards, highlighting her tremendous contributions related to the field of statistics.

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For decades, UCI has been known for its impressive Machine Learning Repository. With more than 580 publicly accessible datasets, the repository serves as a tremendous resource for empirical and methodological research in machine learning. It also serves as a great learning tool for UCI students, thanks to the second annual ML Hackathon, a student competition funded by the National Science Foundation. The UCI research community donated nine challenge datasets from the repository for the event and the Research Cyberinfrastructure Center (RCIC) provided the computational resources.

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The CHOC Research Institute, in partnership with UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), will launch a new data science pediatric capstone project that will explore innovative, data-driven approaches to improve pediatric health and train the next generation of leaders in the field of healthcare data sciences.

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