COVID-19 Research Group
Last spring, as the campus and state shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute responded to the need for mathematical modeling to guide policy decisions and public health outreach. Within weeks, the institute had convened a team of leaders and experts from across the U.S.
Training and Consultation
Are you looking for campus data and computing resources to support your research? Interested in starting new collaborations with data scientists and other researchers on campus? Looking for training in data and computing skills? The Data Science Hub's team of expert facilitators provides consultations and training.
Majors and Courses
UW-Madison offers a BA/BS in Data Science in the College of Letters and Science. Additionally, many Master's and Ph.D. programs on campus involve data science. This website is your starting point to explore majors and courses in data science at UW-Madison.
Faces of Data Science
“Data science can improve dairy productivity in thoughtful ways, not just in terms of how much can we squeeze out of each individual cow, but also thinking about their overall health and well-being.”
Steve Wangen
Assistant Scientist, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery; Data Scientist, American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, UW-Madison
Steve Wangen works with a team of dairy scientists, data scientists, and computer scientists to develop analytical tools that can improve dairy farm profitability, cow productivity, and animal welfare. The Dairy Brain team integrates farm-level data such as feed consumption, milk production, management decisions, and genomic testing. They then apply supervised machine learning approaches, along with other techniques, to provide analytics that can help farmers make decisions about their operations.
Steve is working with team members to build models that can predict milk production over time, approximate a cow’s feed intake, and evaluate the effect of various management decisions on milk production. Other members of the Dairy Brain team are using machine learning techniques to prevent illness in herds. Project researchers are even doing network analyses to understand if the friendships formed between cows can increase milk production.
Steve enjoys using data science to translate research into applied tools that are useful for dairy farmers and other practitioners. In addition to his work on Dairy Brain, Steve is collaborating with UW-Madison colleagues to analyze the use of anonymized campus WIFI signals for COVID-19 contact tracing. If this approach proves effective, it could be rolled out campus-wide and it may have applications for other institutions with large wireless networks.
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 provides an inclusive data science portal to guide people to relevant resources and activities 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.