June 24, 2022
DePaul Students Shine at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium.
CDM students (left to right) Ahad Abubake, Jake Peterson, Maria Alexandra Theodorescu and Nailah Ali are four of 11 Blue Demons who presented at this year's Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium. (Image courtesy of Maria Alexandra Theodorescu)
In the spring, 11 DePaul students participated in the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium at Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center. Two students, Elena Sasso and Maria Alexandra Theodorescu, earned second and third place, respectively, for their poster presentations at the symposium.
“Participation in undergraduate research is a learning activity that broadens and deepens students' classroom learning," says Daniela Stan Raicu, associate provost for research at DePaul. “Students engaged in research develop a range of skills including critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration. Having our undergraduates present at CAURS provided an opportunity to showcase undergraduate research taking place at DePaul, as well as offered the students a sense of community to research teams and labs belonging to the Chicago area."
Sasso, a student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Science and Health, presented on how inflammatory caspases, or enzymes, involved in the immune response are overactive in many inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis and lupus. She argued further study of these caspase will help differentiate them to better understand their inflammatory pathway and achieve the development of caspase inhibitors.
Theodorescu, a student in the School of Computing in the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, covered data science and how end-users of machine learning models are not always trained data scientists. She argued it is crucial these models be infused with domain knowledge in order to increase explainability and trust in their output.
DePaul's showing at the conference included two oral presentations and nine poster presentations. Disciplines of research work presented by the students included engineering, mathematics, computer science, chemistry, physics, biological sciences and psychology.
Check out the latest featured research at DePaul on the University Research, Creative Activities and Innovation website.
December 2020
A Finalist in Transportation Data Analytics Challenge
Bhooma Shivakumar, a graduate student in Data Science at DePaul University, has become a finalist at the Student Data Challenge on Urban Travel Time, Speed, and Reliability organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – Transportation Research Board (TRB) Joint Subcommittee on Travel Time, Speed, and Reliability. The main challenge was to develop a data-driven methodology to assess the impact COVID-19 has had on the transportation networks.
In this project, Bhooma and her advisor Dr. Ilyas Ustun analyzed the effect that COVID-19 has had on driving behavior in Austin, Texas. It was found that the crash count was significantly lower in 2020 compared to 2019. Even though there was a significant drop in the number of crashes, the number of fatalities increased by 14% in 2020. Meanwhile, the average speed in Austin increased during the pandemic and was higher in 2020 than in 2019. The largest increases in average speed occurred during the mornings between 7 – 9 AM and evenings between 4 – 6 PM. These changes in crash count and speed were observed to be the strongest with the onset of the lockdown in March and waned off as the pandemic progressed.
The project will be presented at the 100th Annual Meeting of TRB to be held virtually on January 26th, 2021. We wish the best of luck to Bhooma and Dr. Ilyas Ustun.
October 2020
Data scientists fill in gaps on race, ethnicity in COVID-19 testing – DePaul University researchers use U.S. census data to impute missing data
Thousands of people are being tested for COVID-19 each day, but collecting complete demographic information, including race and ethnicity, has proven difficult. Data science researchers at DePaul University have stepped up in Chicago to help public health officials fill in this missing information. Their work imputing data — replacing missing information with predicted values — brought down the category of “unknown” race in COVID-19 tests in Chicago from 47% to 11%… Read the full article here.
Discover more information on Facebook, Twitter, and Chicago Tonight.
October 2020
Congratulations to our faculty for receiving the AGIF Grant
- Dr. Bamshad Mobasher received a DePaul Academic Innovation and Growth (AGIF) grant of $25,000 from 2020-2022 on the topic Using Machine Learning to Battle the Infodemic of Misinformation in the Age of COVID-19.
- Dr. Thiruvarangan Ramaraj received a DePaul Academic Innovation and Growth (AGIF) grant of $100,000 for three years on the Computational Biology and Applied Bioinformatics (CoBaAB) Lab.
- Dr. Alexander Rasin received a DePaul Academic Innovation and Growth (AGIF) grant of $23,179 for one year on the topic Interactive and Integrated Radiological Image Search (IRIS).
October 2020
Congratulations to our graduate assistant, Hao Wu, for presenting at the HESJ Conference
The graduate assistant of CDS, Hao Wu, will present the Center’s project – Using Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding Method to Impute the Missing Race/Ethnicity in the Chicago Department of Public Health COVID-19 – at the upcoming virtual Health Equity & Social Justice Conference on Friday, November 6th, 2020.
October 2020
Congratulations to our faculty, Dr. Bamshad Mobasher, for receiving a DePaul Academic Initiative Pool Summer Research Grant
Dr. Bamshad Mobasher received a DePaul Academic Initiative Pool Summer Research grant of $5,000 from 2020-2021 on the topic Power of the Few: Analyzing the Impact of influential Users in Collaborative Recommender Systems.
January 2020
Congratulations to our faculty, Dr. Jacob Furst, for receiving a NIH Grant
Dr. Jacob Furst and his collaborator Dr. Leonard Jason in the College of Science and Health (CSH) received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant of $2,857,865 over a five year span from 01/01/2020 – 11/30/2024 on the topic Maintenance and Incidence of ME/CFS following Mono. Their project studies clinical and biological predictors of ME/CFS (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome) following intramuscular treatment to determine the incidence of ME/CFS in a sample of young adults.
September 2019
Bright Idea: Data science professors take a shine to luminous technology for online learning
John McDonald, an associate professor in CDM’s School of Computing (SoC), draws math equations in midair. They glow in the dark as he expounds on linear algebra in data analysis. It’s a video made using lightboard technology in a new production studio run by DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). The Loop campus studio is a jointly funded collaboration between CDM and CTL, which helps faculty design online courses. Its pilot phase this fall comprises five data-science videos, including this one for McDonald’s Advanced Data Analysis course. Discover more information on In the Loop.
May 2019
Congratulations to our faculty, Dr. Tanu Malik, for receiving an NSF CAREER Award
Dr. Tanu Malik was awarded the NSF Career Award “Advanced Containers for Reproducibility in Computational and Data Science”, June 1st, 2019 – May 31st, 2024 (Amount: $498,888.00). The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
April 2019
Congratulations to our student, Sierra Sellman, for winning first place in Energy’s 2019 Geothermal Design Challenge
MS Data Science student Sierra Sellman and her teammate Michelle Rodrigue, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, won first place in the US Department of Energy’s 2019 Geothermal Design Challenge. You can view their portfolio here.
April 2019
DePaul Faculty attends the ACM ICPC World Finals 2019 in Porto, Portugal
Dr. Raicu attended the ACM ICPC World Finals 2019 in Porto, Portugal.
To read more about the event and the winning teams, please visit the ICPC.
January/February 2019
Congratulations to our faculty, Dr. Tanu Malik, for being selected a Better Scientific Software Fellow
Dr. Tanu Malik was selected a Better Scientific Software Fellow, sponsored by Oakridge National Lab under the Exascale Computing Project for research activities relating to the notion of technical debt and using Sciunit to ameliorate it.
August 2018
Congratulations to our faculty, Dr. Daniela Raicu and Dr. Enid Montague, for being awarded a NSF Grant
Dr. Daniela Raicu and Dr. Enid Montague were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support their collaborative project in the field of health analytics and human computer interaction.
July 23, 2018
Data Science Summer Academy 2018
The Data Science Summer Academy is an intensive week-long program to introduce high school students to the fast-growing field of data science. Students explore ways to analyze data, and learn how to create innovative solutions using digital information to make a positive impact in our society. The program was held at DePaul University’s Loop campus on June 25th-29th, 2018. Participants engage in hands-on activities taught in a computer lab setting and are taught by full-time DePaul faculty members with real-world experience. Students use the latest computer applications to build visualizations, to analyze and extract information from data. Projects are drawn from real-life applications around topics that are of interests to the students. The Academy provides students with valuable educational experience and an advantage in today’s competitive world of college admission.
The DePaul Data Science Summer Academy was made possible by a grant from the KDD Impact Program of the SIGKDD. The KDD Impact Program aims to support projects that promote data science, increase its impact on society, and help the data science community. The DePaul proposal is one of the seven outstanding proposals that received funding. There were 75 submissions in total from 20 countries.
For more information, check here.
April 28, 2018
First Annual Joint Chicago ML – DePaul University Machine Learning Hackathon
The First Annual Joint Chicago ML – DePaul University Machine Learning Hackathon (https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-ML/events/249193241/) was hosted on Saturday, April 28, 2018, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at CDM. The event was coordinated by the DePaul Analytics Student group jointly with the Chicago Machine Learning Meetup and the DePaul Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Center. Corporate sponsors included: Senior Lifestyle who provided challenge and datasets; and Brooksource who sponsored the food. About 80 people including DePaul students and members of the Chicago ML meet up attended the event, with 13 teams taking part in the hackathon. Alumni of the MS in Predictive Analytics degree served as mentors during the event, providing technical advice to each team.
April 19, 2018
DePaul Faculty attends the ACM ICPC World Finals 2018 in Beijing, China
Dr. Raicu attended the ACM ICPC World Finals 2018 in Beijing, China.
To read more about the event, please visit the ICPC site at: icpc2018.org and watch live at icpclive.com.
April 15, 2018
Students Win Campus 1871 Competition
MS in Predictive Analytics student Aramide Kehinde was part of the winning team at the annual Campus 1871 competition hosted by 1871. The team also included CDM PhD students Badar al Lawati and Redar Ismail and James Valles (MS CS). Their business model and pitch for their startup, Refugee, took first place over teams from several Chicagoland universities.
For more information, check here.
March 11, 2018
DePaul Faculty Receive Funding of Award from the SIGKDD Impact Program
The KDD Impact Program of the SIGKDD recently awarded a grant to DePaul faculty (Dr. Bamshad Mobasher, Dr. Lucia Dettori, Dr. Raffaella Settimi, and Dr. Daniela Raicu) for the Summer Academy in Data Science for High School Students Project. The KDD Impact Program aims to support projects that promote data science, increase its impact on society, and help the data science community. DePaul proposal is one of the seven outstanding proposals that received funding; there were 75 submissions in total from 20 countries.
For more information, check here.