Three students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship: Thanasi Bakis, Pratyush Muthukumar and Samuel Showalter. Two additional ICS students, Mikaela Nishida and Hayden Freedman, received an honorable mention.

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High school students interested in learning about computer science in a college setting can now apply to UCI’s inaugural Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Summer Academy. For 2022, the ICS Summer Academy will be offering a two-week session titled, “DATA — Data Analytics: Theory & Applications.” From July 25 to Aug. 5, high school students will be on campus Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., exploring the foundations of data science with real-world, hands-on projects.

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In the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), Joni Ricks-Oddie is known as director of the UCI Center for Statistical Consulting, the “one-stop shop” for the UCI community and affiliated organizations needing to collaborate with a statistician. Ricks-Oddie, who earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology from UCLA, helps researchers at UCI, Chapman University, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and other organizations develop grant proposals, calculate sample sizes, interpret data and design research databases.

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Are you an undergraduate student who would like to gain hands-on experience in analyzing data collected from biomedical studies to help prevent and treat various diseases? Are you curious about career options and graduate degree opportunities in biostatistics and biomedical data science? If so, UCI is now accepting applications for its new Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Undergraduate Data Science (ISI-BUDS).

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On March 29, 2022, U.S. News & World Report released its annual graduate school rankings, and UCI had 11 programs place in the top 20 for public universities. Among those were the computer science and statistics graduate programs in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

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Technological advancements are a major reason why the healthcare industry is a field that can constantly evolve to support the ever-changing needs of patients. One of these technologies is data science, which TY Shao believes can spur beneficial discoveries and change in healthcare.

Shao is a graduate student and program ambassador of UCI’s Master of Data Science program and plans to utilize her data science education in healthcare because the medical field “is really close to [her] heart.”

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Recently, UCI announced that researchers had developed a hybrid human-machine framework for AI systems that can complement human expertise:

From chatbots that answer tax questions to algorithms that drive autonomous vehicles and dish out medical diagnoses, artificial intelligence undergirds many aspects of daily life. Creating smarter, more accurate systems requires a hybrid human-machine approach, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In a study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they present a new mathematical model that can improve performance by combining human and algorithmic predictions and confidence scores.

The seeds for this cutting-edge work by researchers in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the School of Social Sciences were first planted decades ago. This collaboration started with Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor in the Computer Science and Statistics Departments, and Mark Steyvers, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences.

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With videos now making up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic, even the smallest improvements in compression algorithms can dramatically impact our ability to store and share information.

“It has been speculated for a long time that neural networks will ultimately revolutionize data compression technologies. Recently, such attempts have proved successful,” says Stephan Mandt, an assistant professor of computer science and statistics in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). Mandt has been at the forefront of this work. “Our group at UCI has been pioneering research into using neural networks to compress data.”

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