Data Science Community Newsletter
The Data Science Community Newsletter (DSCN) covers academic data science research and institution building, open science efforts, government funding of (data) science, and select applications of data science in industry.
Academic Data Science Alliance
The Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA), which published DSCN, has a resources and publications page that includes publications related to the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments and a link to data science institution updates. These updates explain the paths other universities have taken in establishing organizational units for data science education, research, and scholarship.
Data Science Tutorial
This tutorial, given by Eliezer Kanal and Daniel DeCapria, at the August 2017 CERT Data Science and Cybersecurity Symposium (Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University), offers training on data science in cybersecurity principles and practices for individuals with all backgrounds. It covers data science basics, a brief discussion of some techniques, and an overview of the types of insights you can uncover using data science.
Office of Digital Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) offers grant programs that fund project teams experimenting with digital technologies to develop new methodologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, and scholarly communications. ODH funds those studying digital culture from a humanistic perspective and humanists seeking to create digital publications.
Lillian Chong at center of a collaboration illustrating the COVID-19 infection process
Professor Chong creates innovative molecular dynamics simulations of atomic-level protein systems in action. Together with Daniel Zuckerman (Oregon Health and Science University) and her former graduate student, Matthew Zwier (Drake University), she developed the WESTPA software package, which has become a recognized standard for enhancing the efficiency of creating and analyzing simulations. The algorithms of the tool kit create unprecedented views of systems of thousands of atoms acting over longer timescales than previously possible with even the most powerful supercomputers, in some cases taking only weeks compared to the years required by conventional simulations.
NIH-funded SenNet to Create 3D Atlas of Aging Tissues, Shedding Light on Nerve Degeneration, Diabetes, Cancer and Normal Tissue Functions
Grants totaling as much as $125 million over five years to 16 institutions across the U.S. will enable scientists to explore the human body at the molecular level, studying how its cells and tissues age and the role cellular aging plays in health and disease. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and coordinated by scientists in Pittsburgh, the Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet) will create a navigable, 3D map of the body that offers data and analysis on cellular aging. A team to coordinate and provide the computational infrastructure necessary for the effort, led from Pittsburgh, will be funded at a level of $3.5 million in the first year, with a total of $17.5 million over five years.
A team to coordinate and provide the computational infrastructure necessary for the effort, led from Pittsburgh, will be funded at a level of $3.5 million in the first year, with a total of $17.5 million over five years. Jonathan Silverstein, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt and chief research informatics officer at Pitt and UPMC’s Institute for Precision Medicine; Phil Blood of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Pitt and CMU; and Ziv Bar-Joseph of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science will jointly lead the SenNet’s Consortium Organization and Data Coordinating Center (CODCC).
NSF funds $12.5 million biology integration institute at Pitt to study animal resilience to disease
Research on human-created stresses on ecosystems usually focuses on the decline of living systems. University of Pittsburgh biologist Corinne Richards-Zawacki instead investigates why living systems recover – a phenomenon known as resilience. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Richards- Zawacki principal investigator of a new Biology Integration Institute (BII) to explore resilience in living systems, funded by a five year, $12.5 million grant to be shared between the University of Pittsburgh and collaborators at UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Berkeley, University of Nevada Reno, University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, UT-Knoxville, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Vanderbilt. The Institute will be hosted at Pitt.
Pittsburgh Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging
The Pittsburgh Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging (CAIIMI) was launched in January 2020 and has engaged 124 members from 9 different schools at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Carnegie Mellon University. CAIIMI’s vision is to build a center for advanced innovative AI research, education, clinical translation, commercialization, and collaborations in medical imaging by synergizing computational expertise and clinical resources in Pittsburgh, resulting in a world-class imaging AI research and translation center.