Study Data Science
Data Science is the fastest growing major at UW-Madison, and students across campus are interested in increasing their data literacy. Whether you are interested in a data science career or course, opportunities abound at UW-Madison. Learn more about majors, courses, and professional degrees and certificates
Explore Campus Resources
Data science has applications in all disciplines, and data science @ uw is your connection to data science institutes, centers, and programs across the UW-Madison campus. It’s also the place to find research funding, training, coding meetups, news, events and seminars, student orgs, communities of practice, and other resources.
Collaborate With Us
Data science innovation at UW-Madison furthers the Wisconsin Idea by fueling discovery and economic development. Our research and talent development benefit communities and businesses in all corners of the state, and beyond. We are committed to fostering an inclusive culture in data science. Learn about collaboration opportunities
Meet the Data Science Institute's New Director, Kyle Cranmer
Kyle Cranmer is the David R. Anderson Director of the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute. Cranmer leads the institute’s charge: advancing discoveries that benefit society through foundational and use-inspired data science research. He is a professor in the Physics Department with affiliate appointments in Computer Sciences and Statistics. One of Cranmer’s goals is to broaden engagement in data science across the UW-Madison campus. He aims to build partnerships between people working on data science methodology and those working in the natural, physical, and social sciences and the humanities. Read more
Faces of Data Science
“Advances in data science sometimes can turn problems that were once considered impossible into solvable. If the impossible becomes solvable in a reasonable time frame, I think that is really exciting.”
Gary Shiu
Professor, Department of Physics
Growing up in Hong Kong, Gary Shiu spent his weekends at the public library, where he discovered from books he read that the answers to many of his questions about the world and the universe lie in physics. As a graduate student at Cornell, his desire to study both elementary particles and cosmology led him to string theory, which encompasses gravity and quantum mechanics.
String theory has more solutions than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and machine learning (ML) helps Gary discover patterns, such as symmetries, in incredibly vast and complex data. Understanding symmetries and their breaking is a central guiding principle in physics. The power of ML is in revealing multi-dimensional patterns that exceed what humans can visualize in our three-dimensional world. Gary also uses physics-based principles on ML architectures to both improve their efficiencies and understand how ML works.
Gary believes that discovery is catalyzed when like-minded people exchange ideas, often enabling them to reach far beyond their own research domains. He and his colleagues are fostering collaborations through a machine learning and physics initiative, including a seminar series he initiated that can sometimes draw as many as 150 people from Physics and other campus departments, and beyond UW-Madison. These meetings are building relationships and partnerships that may lead to future discovery.
Data science is an emerging field that is roughly defined as the study, development, and application of methods that reveal new insights from data, which include numbers, text, images, graphs, sounds, code, and metadata. This website is an inclusive portal to resources and activities related to data science at UW-Madison.
As data reshapes our world, UW–Madison brings the power of data science to every field of study. The future path of data science will be shaped by insights from all disciplines.