Monthly Archives

February 2017

Emily Mower Provost Receives NSF CAREER Award to Develop Emotion and Mood Recognition for Mental Health Monitoring and Treatment

By | General Interest, News

Prof. Emily Mower Provost has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant for her research project, “Automatic Speech-Based Longitudinal Emotion and Mood Recognition for Mental Health Monitoring and Treatment.”

Prof. Mower Provost’s research interests are in human-centered speech and video processing, multimodal interfaces design, and speech-based assistive technology. The goals of her research are motivated by the complexities of human emotion expression and perception.

More information about the project is available from the College of Engineering and Prof. Mower Provost’s CAREER Award Posting by NSF.

Ambuj Tewari selected as 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science

By | General Interest, News

Ambuj Tewari is one of seven U-M scientists selected for Sloan Fellowships.  Dr. Tewari obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley, and joined the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Statistics in 2012.  He also holds a courtesy appointment at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  Dr. Tewari is also an Affiliate Faculty member in MIDAS.

The two-year, $60,000 fellowships are awarded to scientists “in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field,” according to the organization’s website. Researchers are considered based on nominations, and then selected by an independent panel of senior scientists.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports early career researchers in eight fields, including chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics.

For more information, please see the U-M news release.

MDST announces Detroit blight data challenge; organizational meeting Feb. 16

By | Educational, General Interest, MDSTPosts, MDSTProjects, News

The Michigan Data Science Team and the Michigan Student Symposium for Interdisciplinary Statistical Sciences (MSSISS) have partnered with the City of Detroit on a data challenge that seeks to answer the question: How can blight ticket compliance be increased?

An organizational meeting is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 16 at 5:30 p.m. in EECS 1200.

The city is making datasets available containing building permits, trades permits, citizens complaints, and more.

The competition runs through March 15. For more information, see the competition website.

Data science institutes at University of Michigan and University College London sign academic cooperation agreement

By | Al Hero, Educational, General Interest, News
From left, Al Hero, U-M; Patrick Wolfe, UCL; and Brian Athey, U-M signed an agreement for research and educational cooperation between the University of Michigan and University College London.

From left, Al Hero, U-M; Patrick Wolfe, UCL; and Brian Athey, U-M signed an agreement for research and educational cooperation between the University of Michigan and University College London.

ANN ARBOR, MI and LONDON — The Michigan Institute of Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan and the Centre for Data Science and Big Data Institute at UCL (University College London) have signed a five-year agreement of scientific and academic cooperation.

The agreement sets the stage for collaborative research projects between faculty of both institutions; student exchange opportunities; and visiting scholar arrangements, among other potential partnerships.

“There is a lot of common ground in what we do,” said Patrick Wolfe, Executive Director of UCL’s Centre for Data Science and Big Data Institute. “Both MIDAS and UCL cover the full spectrum of data science domains, from smart cities to healthcare to transportation to financial services, and both promote cross-cutting collaboration between scientific disciplines.”

Alfred Hero, co-director of MIDAS and professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U-M, said that one of the original goals of the institute when it was founded in 2015 under U-M’s $100 million Data Science Initiative was to reach out to U.S. and international partners.

“It seemed very natural that this would be the next step,” Hero said, adding that it would complement MIDAS’s recent partnership with the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data in China. “UCL epitomizes the collaboration, multi-disciplinarity and multi-institutional involvement that we’re trying to establish in our international partnerships.”

Wolfe visited Ann Arbor in early January to sign a memorandum of understanding along with Hero and Brian Athey, professor of bioinformatics and the other MIDAS co-director.

The agreement lists several potential areas of cooperation, including:

  • joint research projects
  • exchange of academic publications and reports
  • sharing of teaching methods and course design
  • joint symposia, workshops and conferences
  • faculty development and exchange
  • student exchange
  • exchange of visiting research scholars.

Links:

MIDAS at U-M

UCL Big Data Institute

Follow UCL’s data science activities @uclbdi

Follow MIDAS at @ARC_UM