2019 CDSE Days amps up student engagement with a symposium, TED-style talks and a buildathon

by Michelle Bowen

With the traditional overarching topics of data science, programming and high-performance computing, the event began on April 8 with a Research Symposium that included presentations on cutting-edge research by leading experts and a poster session and reception, where graduate students presented posters on their research.

The weeklong event also featured a variety of hands-on workshops, TED-style talks focused on “Innovation in Data Science Across Industry,” a career symposium for computational science students, and concluded with the Blockchain Buildathon on April 13.

The Blockchain Buildathon provided students with the opportunity to work together in teams to solve computer science-related challenges on the spot for several local companies, including M&T Bank, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western New York, and ValueCentric.

CDSE Days aims to increase educational opportunities and employability for students, attract new graduate students to UB, and boost research opportunities for aligned faculty members.

Highlights from this year’s event include:

Keynote lectures

• Karthik Sridharan, Cornell University, “Towards Building Non-Polarizing Recommender Systems”
• Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University, “Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness”
• Robert Moser, University of Texas at Austin, “Making Reliable Computational Predictions: Is it Possible?”
• Jia Li, Pennsylvania State University, “Clustering of High Dimensional Data With Uncertainty Assessment”

Ted-Style Talks

• Vijayant Kumar, Sentient Science
• Jason Jankowiak, Socially Determined
• Peruvemba Satish, American Century Investments
• Shilpam Pandey, M&T Bank
• Nicholas Clermont, SomaDetect

UB Symposium on Job and Career Perspectives for Students in the Computational Sciences
This symposium gives students in the areas of computational research the opportunity to ask questions and hear about career prospects from people in industry. Read a review of the event here.

The full schedule of events is available online.

About CDSE

CDSE stands for Computational and Data-Enabled Sciences and Engineering, a discipline that integrates computing, data sciences and domain sciences. The goal is to train students as data scientists who deliver knowledge and insight that is crucial to advancing both scientific knowledge and solving complex business problems. It offers graduate programs (PhD and masters) to train the next generation of cyber scientists on integrating large computing and big data to tackle research problems in fields ranging from multiscale modeling and design of materials to natural disasters, smart electric grids and medical technologies.

It is a collaboration between UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Management, the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the School of Public Health and Health Professions, and the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

More recently, CDSE partnered with UB’s Center for Computational Research to create new modular education offerings as part of the newly constituted Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS). ICDS is funded by SUNY under its Performance Improvement Fund.