Our Mission

MIDAS strengthens University of Michigan’s preeminence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and enables their transformative use in a wide range of research disciplines to achieve lasting societal impact.

Our Goals

  1. Community: Build a world-class data science community at U-M.
  2. Diversity and Inclusion: Ensure inclusion and promote diversity at all stages of the academic pipeline for data science, from high school students to organization leaders.
  3. Research: Catalyze and coordinate sustainable, multi-disciplinary and cutting-edge data science research.
  4. Education: Develop and support programs to educate the next generation of data science workforce, research leaders and citizens.
  5. Collaboration: Develop academic, industry, government and community partnerships in data science.
  6. Dissemination: Communicate UM data science accomplishments.
  7. Translation: Support the application of data science into impactful products, services, and policies, towards a better data-enabled society of tomorrow.

Our Community and Programs

MIDAS has ~355 affiliate faculty from 17 schools and colleges at U-M Ann Arbor campus, and from U-M Dearborn and Flint campuses. They participate in MIDAS research and training events; are eligible for research resources and support programs; and contribute to the development of research resources and other MIDAS programs.  Their expertise encompasses theoretical foundations of data science, a wide range of data science and artificial intelligence methodology, and its applications in almost all research areas at U-M.  MIDAS promotes a diverse and inclusive data science community by giving spotlights to women and underrepresented minorities as committee members and event speakers, and organizing training and social events specifically for these underrepresented groups.

MIDAS leads, enables and facilitates data science research through a number of approaches: 1) developing guidance and resources for research best practices such as reproducible data science; 2) enabling innovative, interdisciplinary research through pilot funding and dataset access; 3) facilitating ideas and teams through themed working groups and support for grant proposals; and 4) workshops and bootcamps for domain scientists who are new to data science.  

MIDAS builds research skills for >1000 students and postdocs in the U-M data science community, through programs such as the Michigan Data Science Fellows, the Graduate Data Science Certificate Program, sponsorship for student data science organizations, data competitions, research and class projects. In addition, MIDAS is a partner in the U-M Master’s in Data Science program and undergraduate data science programs. 

MIDAS works with a large number of industry, academia, government and non-profit organizations to ensure that data science research is enabled by real-world data and inspired by real-world challenges, and that research outcomes are translated into products, services and policies that bring about positive social change.  Its Corporate Partnership program offers comprehensive support for joint research and talent recruitment.  MIDAS is a member of the NSF Midwest Big Data Hub and provides leadership in several focus areas.