News & Events

Applications for the DDDI Postdoctoral Fellowship are now open for the 2025/2026 cycle!

The DDDI Postdoctoral Fellowship is an opportunity open to all postdocs in the School of Arts & Sciences who use data science as a significant part of their research methodology. We encourage postdocs across the natural and social sciences to apply.

Accepted applicants will join a group of data-driven postdoctoral fellows who regularly meet together as well as with faculty and visitors to discuss their research and exchange ideas. Fellows will receive a research stipend (up to $5,000 total) for one year to support their research efforts.

The application deadline is January 15th, 2025. Information on how to apply can be found here.

For more details, please visit our information for faculty page, or contact crtwomey@sas.upenn.edu.

Take a break from finals stress and join us for a Data Science & Analytics Minor Study Break! 🎉

DDDI and PDRI/DevLab are hiring a data scientist! This is a unique opportunity at the intersection of data science, interdisciplinary research, and social impact. We’re looking for someone with a strong quantitative and machine learning background, as well as experience in spatial data analysis, to help drive our research projects and contribute to our data science for social good mission.

Interested or know someone who might be? Learn more and apply here.

The Data Driven Discovery Initiative and MindCORE will co-host a seminar featuring Mala Murthy on Friday, October 25th, at noon in the SAIL Room (111 Levin Building). Mala and her group work at the forefront of quantifying and modeling behavior, and causally linking behavior to brain-wide dynamics.

If you’re a graduate student or postdoc please also consider joining for Mala’s lunch immediately following the seminar. Email Jessica Marcus to sign up. Mala is a great person to chat with, so please do not hesitate to join.

Friday 10/25 at 12pm – DDDI + MindCORE Seminar

Title: Circuit Mechanisms for Dynamic Social Interaction
Speaker: Mala Murthy (Princeton, Professor of Neuroscience)
Organizers: MindCORE + DDDI
Date: Friday, October 25th, 2024
Time: 12pm – 1:15pm
Location: SAIL Room (111 Levin Building)

Abstract: Our research explores the neural mechanisms underlying flexibility during natural social interactions – how animals process dynamic sensory cues from a partner, make decisions, and pattern the appropriate action for the current context. During Drosophila social interactions, males produce time-varying songs via wing vibration, while females arbitrate mating decisions. We discovered that male song structure and intensity are continually sculpted by the movements of the female, over timescales ranging from tens of milliseconds to minutes, and we have investigated the underlying circuit mechanisms, from visual processing to the sequencing of actions. My lab has also investigated how song representations in the female brain drive changes in her behavior, again across multiple timescales. To uncover these mechanisms, we have developed new methods for quantification and computational modeling of behavior, as well as for brain-wide neural recording, and we combine these with the genetic and neural circuit tools of the Drosophila model system. We also recently generated the first whole-brain connectome for Drosophila, and I will discuss how we are leveraging this resource, to connect circuit architecture and activity at brain scale to behavior.

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

The Penn Libraries and South Asia Studies department present a space for technology orientation. Participants can understand the possibilities and limitations of critical digital humanities tools and will learn Computational Text Analysis (CTA) of content found in manuscripts, inscriptions, maps, and other historical documents. The discussions in these sessions aim to bring together South Asia scholars, digital humanities specialists, data librarians, subject specialists, research software & programming engineers, and manuscript studies curators to engage in conversation about the field of collections as data at large.

The workshop will be held from 9:30am – 5:00pm on October 10th and from 9:30am – 4:00pm on October 11th. The talks are open to the public, may be presented in a hybrid format, and will be recorded for sharing at a later date. See here for more information on the workshop schedule.

In order to participate in this workshop, please apply here. Please note that participants in the hands-on sessions must be prepared to attend both days of the workshop as well as a prior software installation session.

MindCORE and DDDI are excited to co-host an event featuring Lyle Ungar and Konrad Korning on Friday, September 27, at 12 PM.

Join us for their talk, “How to Use Large Language Models,” and explore the capabilities of tools like ChatGPT for effective data analysis and writing. Lyle and Konrad will also share their insights on integrating these models into their workflows and discuss key concerns regarding reliability.

Please join us for a series of talks on AI for Philadelphia. Students and faculty from across Penn will showcase how advances in AI are directly benefiting the city’s schools, infrastructure, and technology.

In addition to exploring the impact of AI, we will discuss prospects for new ventures, including potential partnerships with city agencies. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how AI is shaping the future of Philadelphia.

Event date and time to be announced. Please check back soon.

The Data Driven Discovery Initiative is proud to co-sponsor this year’s International Conference for Computational Social Science (IC2S2). This year’s conference will be held at the University of Pennsylvania from July 17th-20th, 2024.

IC2S2 has emerged as the dominant conference at the intersection of social and computational science, bringing together researchers from around the world in economics, sociology, political science, psychology, cognitive science, management, computer science, statistics and the full range of natural and applied sciences committed to understanding the social world through large-scale data and computation. IC2S2 is the annual conference of the International Society for Computational Social Science.

The full-scale three-day conference (July 17th-20th) will feature research and researchers from around the world, across a broad range of relevant fields, and working on all areas of computational social science to advance its many frontiers.

The IC2S2 community actively balances and maintains a conversation between social and computational scientists which integrates technological advances and opportunities with social scientific rigor and insight.

Learn more about IC2S2 and view the conference program here.

DDDI is excited to support the launch of the University Atlas project (uAtlas): an effort to map Penn’s vibrant research community. Visitors to uAtlas can explore decades worth of publications authored by faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences map, with more schools coming soon. Founded by DDDI executive director Colin Twomey, uAtlas leverages recent advances in large language models to automatically organize scholarly publications according to their topics and themes. The result is a collection of visually engaging maps that showcase the interdisciplinary nature of research at Penn, highlighting the many connections between Penn’s departments, centers, and faculty. uAtlas offers researchers a new way to quickly identify potential collaborators across fields, identify emerging trends, and orient newcomers to Penn’s research community.

To learn more, read Penn Today’s featured article about uAtlas.

Please join us for the Data Driven Discovery Initiative’s 2024 Summer Hangouts program! Undergrads, grad students, and postdocs are all invited to participate in informal, hands-on tutorials led by our team of experienced DDDI postdoctoral research fellows. These tutorials are open to students from all backgrounds and skill levels, covering a wide range of data science topics including machine learning and generative AI for scientific discovery. The series will kick off with a faculty talk from Prof. Lyle Unger, and close with a special guest tutorial from MindCORE Associate Director Russell Ritchie.

Hangouts will be held twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon – 1pm, June 11th to June 25th, in the RDDSX space in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. A pizza lunch will be provided. We will also have a live-stream (links below) of the session for those who cannot attend in person.

Tuesday sessions live-stream link here.

Thursday sessions live-stream link here.

Please see here for more details – and be sure to RSVP!