Please join us for the Data Driven Discovery Initiative’s 2023 Summer Hangouts program! Undergrads, grad students, and postdocs are all invited to participate in informal, hands-on tutorials led by our team of DDDI postdoctoral research fellows. These tutorials are open to students from all backgrounds and skill levels, covering a wide range of data science topics. Hangouts are held once a week on Thursdays from July 20th through August 17th in the newly renovated RDDSX space in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, with a pizza lunch between tutorial sessions. Details and the full schedule are available here:

Summer Hangouts 2023

Thank you to all our DDDI postdoctoral fellows for the many insightful conversations at our postdoc lunches this past year. If you happen to be on or near campus on June 30th, please come join us at the Kaskey Park BioPond for a reunion to celebrate our past academic year together. Have a great summer, and looking forward to seeing you again in the Fall!

Photo credit: the Kaskey Park gallery.

The Carpentries is an international network of data scientists and technical specialists who provide training in a wide range of data skills including Python, R, data management, and much more. The two-day workshop (from 10am-3pm, with additional hang-out and Q&A until 5pm) will be taught by data specialists from academia and industry brought in for Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program students. Students will be introduced to OpenRefine, a tool for data management, and Python, the primary programming language for most data scientists. From data analysis with pandas to data visualization with matplotlib, the session will prove useful to add to students’ technical toolkit for academic research, further studies, and beyond. Participants will be using a real-world data set to learn and practice skills that can be applied to any research area. Moreover, participants will gain access to Penn libraries data specialists who can assist students throughout their research and time at Penn. This event is co-sponsored by the Penn Libraries, Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships, Data Driven Discovery Initiative, MindCORE in association with Data Carpentries.

The arrival of ChatGPT has sparked lively debate about how generative AI will impact universities like ours and society at large. Penn faculty have been at the forefront of tracking the impact of AI across diverse fields including the sciences, technology, media and business. We are at a potentially transformative moment in the use of AI, with tantalizing opportunities and challenges ahead. Please join us for a panel discussion hosted by Penn’s Data Driven Discovery Initiative  on “Human Centered AI: Where is ChatGPT and Generative AI Headed?” The event will take place on Thursday, Feb 23 at 4pm in the Orrery Pavilion (6th floor of Van Pelt Library)

A recording of this event can be viewed here.

LOVE data is an international celebration of all things data that takes place during the week of Valentine’s Day. Each year, institutions and schools such as University of Michigan, Harvard, and Brown put on data events for the public and Penn is no exception. On Friday, Feb 17th, Data Driven Discovery Initiative is teaming up with Penn Libraries’ Research Data & Digital Scholarship to celebrate our love of data related to the environment. The event will feature a keynote talk by Dr. Eduardo Mercado on how analyzing whale songs can reveal insights about our ecosystem, a panel discussion with the Water Center and True Elements on urban water use data, a tutorial on obtaining/visualizing renewable energy data, and a walk in the Woodlands to collect visceral data. For more information, check out our LOVE Environment Data Day page.

Time: Friday, Feb 17th from 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM

Location: Class of ’78 Orrery Pavilion (Van Pelt-Dietrich Library – 6th Floor)

The new Amy Gutmann Hall is set to be completed in 2024 and will be a central location for data science training and research across disciplines. This article highlights the current plans. Initial construction was announced in 2019, upon receiving a $25 million gift to support the data science building.

The School of Arts and Sciences’ Data Driven Discovery Initiative is pleased to announce the 2022 Call for Proposals for the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) seed grants.

Data Science for Social Good projects may address any societal challenge that affects the well-being of a large number of people, including but not limited to: health, public safety, justice, clean air and water, education, employment, transit, and political representation. We hope to fund several projects focusing on Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, but projects beyond the region, including national and global issues, are also welcome and encouraged. The ideal project should blend the development or use of innovative data science methods, the advancement of scholarship within or across disciplines, and progress in addressing a societal challenge.

Proposals from SAS Standing Faculty

Members of the SAS standing faculty are eligible to submit proposals, but faculty from other schools may play a major role in the projects as well. We support a range of funding requests, but typical grants range from $20,000 – $50,000 for a duration of one to two years. Proposals with especially high impact or particularly complex projects and teams can request funding outside of this range, but we recommend first checking with the initiative’s contacts listed below.

Joint SAS/SEAS Proposals

The seed grant program also aims to spur collaboration specifically between faculty and students in SAS and SEAS to develop and apply data science methods for social good. The School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Arts & Science will partner to sponsor joint projects with at least one faculty member from SAS and at least one faculty member from SEAS.

Joint SAS/Wharton Proposals

We are also interested in spurring collaborations between faculty and students in SAS and Wharton to develop and apply data science methods for social good. The Wharton School and the School of Arts & Science will partner to sponsor joint projects with at least one faculty member from SAS and at least one faculty member from Wharton.

Proposal Process

Grants may support

• Post-docs, research staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The typical grant would support students over the summer months
• Costs associated with data acquisition
• Equipment expenses, including costs for specialized computing not normally available at Penn
• Travel

Application contents

• Written proposal that ideally includes a project summary, goals, timeframe, plan for evaluation, and plan for the involvement of students (max 2 single space pages)
• Signed letters of support from appropriate partnering organizations (if partnering with an outside entity like a government agency)
• CVs from faculty project directors
• Project budget

Grant process

• The application deadline for the first round of DSSG seed grants is February 15, 2023 *Note deadline extension
• Members of the DDD executive committee and appropriate additional faculty as needed will review and rank the proposals
• Award notifications will be made in early March
• Funds will be available as soon as the award is made based on budget requirements
• A short (1-2 page) summary report that describes the activities supported by the grant, due one year after the receipt of project funds

Submit proposals to the DSSG submission page.

Expressions of interest and general proposal questions may be sent to ddd-info@sas.upenn.edu.

DDDI invites all post-doctoral fellows in the School of Arts & Sciences who are developing or using data science methods to apply to be a Data Science Fellow. If data science is a significant part of your research and you are interested in cross-disciplinary interactions, apply to become a Fellow. You will join an exciting group of postdocs spanning the social and natural sciences, will have weekly interactions with faculty and visitors, and will receive funding through one of two ways:

1. Via DDDI support (up to 50 percent salary support) for up to three years. These could be postdocs already be at Penn or new hires. Faculty must recommend these postdocs to DDDI. More information for faculty can be found on our faculty instructions page.
2. OR via a research fund (up to $5000 total) for one year to support your research (travel, equipment, visitors, etc.). These could be postdocs already at Penn or new hires. Stipend is subject for renewal.

Those who apply to the salary support program but are no longer considered will still be eligible to be considered for the research stipend.

Postdoc fellows regardless of funding source will be expected to:

• regularly attend and contribute to our weekly postdoc meetings
• participate in DDDI events and activities when possible
• contribute a tutorial or research presentation to DDDI (once per semester)

Application Instructions

For those interested in applying to the stipend award, please submit the following 4 items along with your completed application form by following this link to the postdoc fellows submission page:

• Describe how you use data science methods in your research. Maximum 1 page single-spaced. A reference list after the research statement can be included and will not count toward the 1 page limit.
• Include links to 1-3 papers (published or working papers) that show your use of data science in your research
• An updated CV
• A statement from your postdoc advisor endorsing your participation in the DDDI fellows program (a one sentence acknowledgement is sufficient)

For those interested in applying to the partial salary support program:

• Consult your prospective postdoc advisor to express interest and inform them about the salary support program
• Faculty advisors must give us notice that you have been shortlisted as a postdoc (or already hired as a postdoc with them) and exemplify high data science related work, and request candidates to submit all the above materials for the stipend award INCLUDING 3 recommendation letters to them. Faculty should consult the faculty instruction page for our selection criteria and how to solicit postdoc positions through our salary support program.
• Faculty advisors will forward all of the candidates’ materials to ddd-info@sas.upenn.edu or to our leadership board for consideration

Granting process

• The first round of postdoc fellows will be selected by a DDDI committee from the applications submitted by January 31, 2023
• Selections will be made in early February, with funds available as soon as the award is made

General application questions may be sent to ddd-info@sas.upenn.edu.

View our current postdocs on the Data Science Postdoc Fellows page.

We invite all postdocs to join the DDDI activities and events. Everyone can join our mailing list to stay up to date on new events.

DDDI will support the hiring of outstanding postdoctoral fellows in the natural and social sciences with expertise in data science. The support will be in the form of partial (up to 50 percent) salary support for up to 3 years. We intend to support 4-6 postdocs across SAS. These postdocs could either already be at Penn or they could be new hires. For postdocs co-supervised by faculty from SAS and another school (e.g. Wharton, PSOM), the application should clear state that the postdoc has research interests spanning both schools and which faculty members from which schools would be supervising them. Regardless of which school the postdoc is affiliated with, the postdoc’s salary must come from a SAS budget where DDDI would be able to contribute to.

The ideal candidate would have expertise in their own discipline as well as the modern methodology of machine learning and statistics. They would have a faculty advisor and a possible co-advisor in a separate department. They would benefit from the activities of DDDI, including seminars, lunch-time faculty talks and discussions, and interactions with students and postdocs across SAS with overlapping interests. They would help organize some of these activities and spend up to 1 day per week at a shared work space on campus. Their data science activities would be synergistic with their research.

A committee of SAS faculty will be responsible for selecting the postdocs. For current postdocs at Penn, faculty members will need to follow the submission guidelines for partial salary support from our application instructions page.

Faculty members who would like to include partial salary support from DDDI in their postdoctoral ads to attract new candidates can: (a) include language about DDDI and data science expertise in their ad, (b) let us know of their hiring plan and timing, (c) when a shortlist has been made, let us know the name of applicant(s) from the shortlist who they would like considered for salary support, (d) have those applicants submit their DDDI postdoc salary support application materials on our application instructions page to the us. The committee would then make a selection prior to making the offer, so the faculty member knows they can count on partial funding from DDDI. The data science opportunities may also help attract promising candidates.

The first round of postdoc fellows will be selected by a DDDI committee from the applications submitted by January 31, 2023

Expressions of interest and questions may be emailed to ddd-info@sas.upenn.edu

Organized by DevLab@Penn/PDRI and co-sponsored by Perry World House, USAID’s Center for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, USAID’s Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub and Penn SAS’ Data Driven Discovery Initiative, this event will convene an excellent group of academics and practitioners to discuss the current state of big data and machine learning in the development sector. While the earlier conference provided a broad overview of topics, the goal of this conference is to dig more deeply into four issues of crucial importance to both the research and practitioner communities:

• The use of computational tools to detect corruption and provide a tool for accountability
• The use of big data from media to measure civic activity, political polarization and disinformation
• The use of large-scale, micro-level data and computational tools to study the causes, dynamics, and consequences of conflict
• The use of social media data to monitor and respond to humanitarian crises

The Big Data for Development and Governance Event will be held on October 20 & 21, 2022 at the Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics. In recognition that many development organizations and researchers are currently developing tools and techniques to work with big data, the first half-day of the conference will include workshop sessions on working with social media data, running digital experiments and training natural language processing models; these sessions will target technically-minded participants, but not those already proficient in such techniques. The second day will focus on the presentation of research on, and discussion of, the four key topics noted above. Full detailed two-day agenda and list of panelists can be viewed here.

To register for the event, RSVP to Diego Romero (djrom18@sas.upenn.edu) by Oct 17, 2022