Data Science Nights are monthly talks on data science techniques or applications, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome! NICO is thrilled to sponsor these monthly events and support this growing community.
Data Science Nights are currently organized by Huaxia Zhou and Eleanor Degen with administrative support provided by NICO. Please contact the organizers to suggest a speaker or to be added to our mailing list.
TBA, October 2024 Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Data Science Nights will return in the Fall 2024 term. Please contact Huaxia Zhou and Eleanor Degen to suggest a speaker or to be added to our mailing list.
Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 5:20pm (US Central) Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Speaker: Ryan McKeown, PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program (IBiS), Northwestern University "Decreasing False-discovery Rates in Genome-wide Association Studies with Iterative Principal Component Analysis (PCA)"
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 at 5:20pm (US Central) Chicago Campus
Speaker: Jenny Ding, PhD Student, Feinberg School of Medicine, Department of Preventive Medicine "SOAR elucidates disease mechanisms and empowers drug discovery through spatial transcriptomics"
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 5:20pm (US Central) Fisk Hall, Room 114, Evanston Campus
Speaker: Eliza Duvall, PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program (IBiS), Northwestern University "Co-expression Network Sparsification via Effective Resistance"
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 at 5:20pm (US Central) Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Speaker: Yingdan Lu, Assistant Professor at the School of Communication, Northwestern University "Understanding the Evolution of Digital Propaganda Through Video-as-Data Methods".
Thursday, May 25, 2023 at 5:20pm (US Central) Technological Institute, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston Campus, Room L160
Speaker: Imran Sultan, PhD Student at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern, "Simulating Everything Everywhere All at Once: Modeling Galaxy Formation"
Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 5:20pm (US Central) Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Speakers:
Spencer Hong, 3rd-year PhD Student, Chemical and Biological Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering "The history of genomics told through machine learning"
Yingkang Xie, 5th-year PhD Student, Marketing, Kellogg School of Management "Platform Leakage: Incentive Conflicts in Two-Sided Markets"
Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 5:15pm (US Central) Mudd Library Room 2210 or via Zoom
Speaker: Wesley Orth, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University Department of Linguistics "The Maze Task: Designing tasks for data quality and web-based social science research"
Monday, February 28, 2022 at 5:15pm (US Central) Online via Zoom
Speaker: Emily Webber, Senior Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services: "A day in the life of the Amazon SageMaker (machine learning) team"
Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
From Astrobiology to Retail Data Science at 84.51°
Speakers:
Caitlin Casar - Data Science Development Program, 84.51°. 2021 PhD, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University. NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship
Alexandra Saldan - Senior Data Scientist, 84.51°. 2016 WCAS graduate, Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Linguistics
Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: Juandalyn Burke, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Department, University of Washington: "Using an Ecological Inference Software Tool to Detect Vote Dilution".
Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: Subhashini Tripuraneni, Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase, leader of the Machine Learning initiatives "AI and Machine Learning to Drive Customer Experience".
Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: Matt Satusky, Postdoctoral Fellow, Renaissance Computing Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Leveraging the NHLBI BioData Catalyst Ecosystem to Accelerate Heart, Lung, and Blood Research".
Data Science Nights - February 2021
Tuesday, February 23, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: Aviv Landau, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Data Science Institute, Columbia University "Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Identification of Child Abuse and Neglect in Hospital Settings with Implications for Bias Reduction and Future Interventions".
Wednesday, January 27, 2021 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: Bryan Pardo, Associate Professor, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University. "New directions in deep audio source separation: training without ground truth and automatic model selection"
Monday, November 23, 2020 at 5:15pm Online via Zoom and Gather
Speaker: William Miller, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University, title: "Distributed High-Frequency Sensing for Assessing Urban Green Infrastructure and Predicting Flooding".
Thursday, February 27, 2020 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Speaker: Yian Yin, PhD candidate at the McCormick School of Engineering, titled: "Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups and security" (Nature, 2019).
Monday, January 27, 2020 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Speaker: Joe Germuska, Executive Director of the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, titled: "Understanding and Using Census Data". This was followed by a hacking session, including working groups and an introduction to pandas and matplotlib in Python for newcomers by Nicolay Markov.
Thursday, November 21, 2019 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Speaker: Daniel W. Linna Jr., Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, titled: "Artificial Intelligence and Law: Creating our Augmented, Automated, Audacious Future".
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
The 2019 fall kickoff of Data Science Nights took place on Wednesday, September 25, 2019. This month featured a talk by IBM Developer Advocate Svetlana Levitan, titled: "Open standards for machine learning model deployment", plus a discussion about topics and working groups for future hacking night sessions.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
The April 2019 Data Science Night featured a talk titled "Bring Your Dirty Data to Work Day" by the Data Science Night organizers. Attendees learned best practices for handling real world data to save time and reduce headaches.
Thursday, March 14, 2019 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
Speaker: Michael Lucas, Lead Data Scientist at Tempus, and a PhD graduate from the EECS department with a specialization in machine learning and natural language processing.
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
The first Data Science Night of the new year kicked off on February 6, 2019 and hosted members of the Sears Deep Learning Center in partnership with Northwestern's Retail Analytics Council.
Thursday, December 6, 2018 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
The December 2018 Data Science Night featured a talk titled "Personality Assessment in the Age of Big Data and Machine Learning" by Andrew Hall, a PhD candidate in Northwestern's Department of Psychology, plus project and learning groups.
Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 6:30pm Chambers Hall, Lower Level
The November 2018 Data Science Night featured a talk titled "Introduction to Machine Learning" by Nicholas Wagner and Abhijith Gopakumar from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, plus project and learning groups.
The July 2018 meeting featured a talk by Christie Nothelfer, PhD, Northwestern Psychology on “Vision Science in Data Visualization” and also a special breakout session with Prof. Suzan van der Lee, from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, on hacking the sensors that NU researchers have deployed on campus.
The June 2018 meeting will feature a talk by Caroline Groth, a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Preventive Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine: "Bayesian Measurement Error and Bayesian Informative Missingness Methods".
The May 2018 meeting featured a talk by Pantelis Loupos (PhD candidate at the Kellogg School of Management) on “100 million Venmo transactions: The Power of Social Networks in Predicting Non-Contractual Customer Behavior”.
The April 2018 meeting featured a talk by Kat Albrecht (PhD student in the Amaral Lab and NICO) on “Fundamental Data Science to Investigate Social Problems”.
The February 2018 meeting had a distinct format compared to previous meetings, with a stronger focus on the breakout sessions. These included: multi-week learning groups, single-evening tutorials, multi-week projects, single-evening projects according to preference of attendees, and the ability to bring your own project or have a code-clinic.
The first Data Science Night featured a talk by Adam Miller (LSSTC Data Science Fellow): "Scikit-learn Soup to Nuts: Developing a Machine-Learning Workflow"