Department of Statistics - Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences

Department of Statistics - Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences

Disney Research Supports Stephan Mandt’s Work on Generative Modeling with $50,000 Gift

Stephan Mandt, an assistant professor of computer science and statistics in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), received an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Disney Research Los Angeles to support his work on generative modeling.

Mandt is exploring how to use machine learning under resource constraints — in particular, given a lack of relevant training data. “In other words, how might you train a deep learning algorithm to mimic speech when you don’t have massive amounts of available speech recordings?”

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Beyond the T-Test: UCI Professors Publish New Statistical Guidance for Neuroscience Research

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine has published a new guide for statistical analysis in neuroscience research. Faculty from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and from the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) in the School of Medicine (SOM) collaborated on the paper, “Beyond T-Test and ANOVA: Applications of Mixed-Effects Models for More Rigorous Statistical Analysis in Neuroscience Research,” published Nov. 15, 2021 in Neuron. The paper provides a readable primer to neuroscience experimentalists who do not have extensive or up-to-date training in statistics.

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Statistics Ph.D. Student Tianyu Pan Wins Two Competitive Awards

Tianyu Pan, a statistics Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), recently won two competitive awards. Pan was one of 16 students worldwide to receive the 2021 Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award and one of five U.S. recipients of the 2021 IBM Student Research Award from the New England Statistical Society.

The first award provides funds for travel to any IMS-sponsored or co-sponsored meeting, while the second award offers recipients the opportunity to present their work at the New England Statistics Symposium.

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Stephan Mandt and Collaborators Receive $3.5 Million to Study Machine Learning for Climate Science

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently awarded $16 million to five research projects developing artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to enable greater scientific insight and new discoveries. “Disruptive technology changes are occurring across science applications, algorithms, architectures, and high-performance computing ecosystems,” said Barbara Helland, the DOE Office of Science’s associate director for advanced scientific computing research. “These projects explore potentially high-impact approaches in AI and machine learning to assist and automate scientific discovery and data analysis for increasingly complex problems.”

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Harnessing the Data Revolution: ICS Researchers and Collaborators Receive $1.5M Data Science Grant

Babak Shahbaba

When Statistics Professor Babak Shahbaba took over as director of the Data Science Initiative, coordinating UCI faculty and students involved in data science activities, the plan was to broaden the initiative’s reach in terms of education, research and external relations. This plan motivated the creation of the Californian Data Experience Transformation (CADET) program, which aims to offer data science training via curriculum development, hands-on experiences, and close interactions with both academic and non-academic organizations.

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UCI News: “UCI-led study finds disparities in O.C. rates of COVID-19 infection, mortality” (Vladimir Minin mentioned)

Socioeconomic, geographic and demographic factors all played critical roles in the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 mortality among Orange County residents last year, according to a study led by the University of California, Irvine. The findings, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, show that some groups were more likely to test positive and die from the virus. Furthermore, risk factors for infection shifted over time.

Read the full story on UCI News.

From Theory to Practice: UCI’s Machine Learning Hackathon Delivers

For decades, UCI has been known for its impressive Machine Learning Repository. With more than 580 publicly accessible datasets, the repository serves as a tremendous resource for empirical and methodological research in machine learning. It also serves as a great learning tool for UCI students, thanks to the second annual ML Hackathon, a student competition funded by the National Science Foundation. The UCI research community donated nine challenge datasets from the repository for the event and the Research Cyberinfrastructure Center (RCIC) provided the computational resources.

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