Maria Alexandra

(Ally) Theodorescu

Ally is a senior undergraduate student at DePaul, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Data Science. She is currently the Student Assistant for the Associate Provost for Research as well as a Research Assistant as part of the Visual Informatics and Data Analytics (VIDA) group at DePaul. Her hobbies/interests include cultivating her coding skills, hiking, drawing, and playing tennis.

Comb BS in Data Science

Tchoua, Roselyne

aly.theo@gmail.com

Project: Clustering Dashboard for Assistive Materials Discovery

“Data science is intrinsically inter-disciplinary; however, end-users of machine learning models are not always trained, data scientists. For this reason, it is crucial that these models be infused with domain knowledge in order to increase explainability and trust in their output. Our ultimate goal is to assign domain-aware confidence scores to help experts make informed decisions. Our hypothesis is that given confidence scores,  end-users will be more willing to trust and adopt machine learning models. We test this hypothesis with materials informatics,  a field that has the potential to greatly reduce time-to-market and development costs for new materials as it leverages machine learning and large datasets for targeted design. For example, automated phase mapping seeks to discover phase regions in the materials, i.e., samples of materials with similar structures (hence similar properties). This is challenging because measurements per sample far exceed the number of samples to cluster making it difficult to interpret and generalize. Towards our goal,  we leverage agreement (or disagreement) across clustering methods as confidence (or uncertainty) scores to guide the annotation of clusters by domain experts and to identify the correct number of phase regions present in XRD datasets. We build a series of visualization and experiments to leverage agreements between clustering methods; we show that we are able to narrow in on the correct number of phase regions in two materials mixture as annotated by experts in the fields.”