My research focus the application and development of new algorithms for solving complex business analytics problems. Applications vary from revenue management, dynamic pricing, marketing analytics, to retail logistics. In terms of methodology, I use a combination of operations research and machine learning/online optimization techniques.
Dr. Brian Lin has 12 years of experience in automotive research at UMTRI after his Ph.D. His current research is focused on mining naturalistic driving data, evaluating driver assistance systems, modeling driver performance and behavior, and estimating driver distraction and workload, using statistical methods, classification, clustering, and survival analysis. His most recent work includes classifying human driver’s decision for a discretionary lane change and traversal at unsignalized intersections, driver’s response to lead vehicle’s movement, and subjective acceptance on automated lane change feature. Dr. Lin also has much experience applying data analytic methods to evaluate automotive system prototypes, including auto-braking, lane departure, driver-state monitoring, electronic head units, car-following and curve-assist systems on level-2 automation, and lane-change and intersection assist on L3 automation on public roads, test tracks, or driving simulators. He is also familiar with the human factors methods to investigate driver distraction, workload, and human-machine interaction with in-vehicle technologies and safety features. He serves as a peer reviewer for Applied Ergonomics, Behavior Research Methods, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and Transportation Research Part F.
A.J is a Research Investigator at ICPSR who also studies topics like public-sector information technology use, scholarly communication, research data management, and public administration. His work can be found on Google Scholar.
I am an Assistant Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and am part of the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. My research examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and how farmers may adapt to reduce negative impacts. I also examine ways that we can sustainably enhance agricultural production. To do this work, I combine remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and agricultural production across large spatial and temporal scales.
Conducting wheat crop cuts to measure yield in India, which we use to train algorithms that map yield using satellite data
Dr. Gen Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics. He is devoted to developing new statistical methods for analyzing complex biomedical data, including multi-way tensor array data, multi-view data, and compositional data. His methodological research interests include dimension reduction, predictive modeling, association analysis, and functional data analysis. He also has research interests in scientific domains including microbiome and genomics.
Novel tree-guided regularization methods can identify important microbial features at different taxonomic ranks that are predictive of the clinical outcome.
Broadly, I study legal decision making, including decisions related to crime and employment. I typically use large social science data bases, but also collect my own data using technology or surveys.
Yixin Wang works in the fields of Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and causal inference, with applications to recommender systems, text data, and genetics. She also works on algorithmic fairness and reinforcement learning, often via connections to causality. Her research centers around developing practical and trustworthy machine learning algorithms for large datasets that can enhance scientific understandings and inform daily decision-making. Her research interests lie in the intersection of theory and applications.
My research focuses on building infrastructure for public health and health science research organizations to take advantage of cloud computing, strong software engineering practices, and MLOps (machine learning operations). By equipping biomedical research groups with tools that facilitate automation, better documentation, and portable code, we can improve the reproducibility and rigor of science while scaling up the kind of data collection and analysis possible.
Research topics include:
1. Open source software and cloud infrastructure for research,
2. Software development practices and conventions that work for academic units, like labs or research centers, and
3. The organizational factors that encourage best practices in reproducibility, data management, and transparency
The practice of science is a tug of war between competing incentives: the drive to do a lot fast, and the need to generate reproducible work. As data grows in size, code increases in complexity and the number of collaborators and institutions involved goes up, it becomes harder to preserve all the “artifacts” needed to understand and recreate your own work. Technical AND cultural solutions will be needed to keep data-centric research rigorous, shareable, and transparent to the broader scientific community.
My PhD research focused on identifying the size and mineralogical composition of interstellar dust through X-ray imaging of dust scattering halos to X-ray spectroscopy of bright objects to study absorption from intervening material. Over the course of my PhD I also developed an open source, object oriented approach to computing extinction properties of particles in Python that allows the user to change the scattering physics models and composition properties of dust grains very easily. In many cases, the signal I look for from interstellar dust requires evaluating the observational data on the 1-5% level. This has required me to develop a deep understanding of both the instrument and the counting statistics (because modern-day X-ray instruments are photon counting tools). My expertise led me to a postdoc at MIT, where I developed techniques to obtain high resolution X-ray spectra from low surface brightness (high background) sources imaged with the Chandra X-ray Observatory High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer. I pioneered these techniques in order to extract and analyze the high resolution spectrum of Sgr A*, our Galaxy’s central supermassive black hole (SMBH), producing a legacy dataset with a precision that will not be replaceable for decades. This dataset will be used to understand why Sgr A* is anomalously inactive, giving us clues to the connection between SMBH activity and galactic evolution. In order to publish the work, I developed an open source software package, pyXsis (github.com/eblur/pyxsis) in order to model the low signal-to-noise spectrum of Sgr A* simultaneously with a non-physical parameteric model of the background spectrum (Corrales et al., 2020). As a result of my vocal advocacy for Python compatible software tools and a modular approach to X-ray data analysis, I became Chair for HEACIT (which stands for “High Energy Astrophysics Codes, Interfaces, and Tools”), a new self-appointed working group of X-ray software engineers and early career scientists interested in developing tools for future X-ray observatories. We are working to identify science cases that high energy astronomers find difficult to support with the current software libraries, provide a central and publicly available online forum for tutorials and discussion of current software libraries, and develop a set of best practices for X-ray data analysis. My research focus is now turning to exoplanet atmospheres, where I hope to measure absorption from molecules and aerosols in the UV. Utilizing UM access to the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, I work to observe the dip in a star’s brightness caused by occultation (transit) from a foreground planet. Transit depths are typically <1%, and telescopes like Swift were not originally designed with transit measurements (i.e., this level of precision) in mind. As a result, this research strongly depends on robust methods of scientific inference from noisy datasets.
As a graduate student, I attended some of the early “Python in Astronomy” workshops. While there, I wrote Jupyter Notebook tutorials that helped launch the Astropy Tutorials project (github.com/astropy/astropy-tutorials), which expanded to Learn Astropy (learn.astropy.org), for which I am a lead developer. Since then, I have also become a leader within the larger Astropy collaboration. I have helped develop the Astropy Project governance structure, hired maintainers, organized workshops, and maintained an AAS presence for the Astropy Project and NumFocus (the non-profit umbrella organization that works to sustain open source software communities in scientific computing) for the last several years. As a woman of color in a STEM field, I work to clear a path by teaching the skills I have learned along the way to other underrepresented groups in STEM. This year I piloted WoCCode (Women of Color Code), an online network and webinar series for women from minoritized backgrounds to share expertise and support each other in contributing to open source software communities.
I build data science tools to address challenges in medicine and clinical care. Specifically, I apply signal processing, image processing and machine learning techniques, including deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks and natural language processing, to aid diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of patients with acute and chronic conditions. In addition, I conduct research on novel approaches to represent clinical data and combine supervised and unsupervised methods to improve model performance and reduce the labeling burden. Another active area of my research is design, implementation and utilization of novel wearable devices for non-invasive patient monitoring in hospital and at home. This includes integration of the information that is measured by wearables with the data available in the electronic health records, including medical codes, waveforms and images, among others. Another area of my research involves linear, non-linear and discrete optimization and queuing theory to build new solutions for healthcare logistic planning, including stochastic approximation methods to model complex systems such as dispatch policies for emergency systems with multi-server dispatches, variable server load, multiple priority levels, etc.
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