Announcements

November 2021: Faculty Data Science Fellow Seed Funding Awards announced.

We are pleased to announce the following Faculty Fellows who have been awarded seed grants to support their data science work in 2022:

Brian Gearin and Jessica Turtura, “Understanding State-Level Dyslexia Legislation through Natural Language Processing”
María Reina Santiago-Rosario, “Identifying Pivotal Teacher Instructional Behaviors to Achieve Racial Equity in School Discipline”
Keith Zvoch, “Predicting 9th Grade On-Track to Graduation Status with Tree-Based Variants of the Semi-Parametric Stochastic Mixed Effects Model”

July 2021: SDS Network Member Cengiz Zopluoglu wins the National Institute of Justice’s Recidivism Forecasting Challenge:

Read more: https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/recidivism-forecasting-challenge-results

Spring 2021 Course on Data Science

Spring 2021: CIS 410/510 Data Science Studio
CRN 31578 (410), 31597 (510)
MW 10:15-11:45 (Remote)
Professor Steve Fickas (fickas@cs.uoregon.edu)

This is a course for students interested in data science using a style called Exploratory Programming. The course will look at ways one can manipulate, analyze, and predict from data. Example datasets will be drawn across a wide range of disciplines from within the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as from the Business, Journalism and Education fields.

Programming with Python will be an integral part of the studio. However, the course has no prerequisites. In particular, there is no programming prerequisite; the course will start from scratch in terms of programming in Python.

The title includes “Studio” to denote it is very much a hands-on course. A percentage of class time will be spent working on data science problems, interacting with fellow students and the professor. Students will be given data from a variety of fields and asked to explore it in an interesting way.

The overall goal of the course is to provide a data science foundation that students can then build on through follow on courses or on their own using the myriad of online training sites. To provide this foundation, the course will cover these topics.

1. Managing big data sets and sharing with others. We will focus on the basics of github.
2. Use of jupyter notebooks to practice with the steps (AKA the workflow) of data science, i.e., wrangling, exploring, modeling, testing, tuning.
3. Use of Python as the exploration programming language.
4. The basics of an important data science topic, machine learning.
5. Awareness of the controversies surrounding data science.

Enroll in the NEW Data Science Specialization for Education and Social Systems Leaders

Become a “big data” leader who has the skills to use data to guide decision making. Data-informed decision-making is now the new minimum standard of practice in many fields, including education and social systems.

A five-course Data Science Specialization in Educational Leadership is available now in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership (EMPL) at the University of Oregon. Contact Dr. Kathleen Scalise (kscalise@uoregon.edu) or Dr. Gerald Tindal (geraldt@uoregon.edu) for information about how the Data Science Specialization can be become a emphasis area of a doctoral or master’s degree in EMPL.

Faculty Data Science Fellowship

The SDS Network is offering its members the opportunity to participate in a free, high-quality professional development training in data science. This program will entail three intensive training modules to be offered in the winter, spring, and fall terms of 2021. Faculty Fellows must agree to fully participate in all three training modules.

The training will provide a foundational level of programming knowledge in natural language processing and predictive analytics, programming in Python, and advanced classification and neural networks. The goal is for Faculty Fellows to apply the obtained knowledge and skills to their current and future projects and proposals.

Questions about the Faculty Data Science Fellowship? Email: sdsnetwork@uoregon.edu

October 2020: Announcing the 2021 Faculty Data Science Fellowship Program:

Read more: https://around.uoregon.edu/content/data-science-research-network-seeking-new-faculty-fellows