COVID-19 Research Group
There is an urgent need to develop models that can inform policy makers, as well as the general public, in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. An interdisciplinary coalition hosted by the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute is rapidly curating information.
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 has incredible potential to break down boundaries, and discover new knowledge and new ways to help people. It’s incredibly satisfying work.”
Iain McConnell
Data Scientist
American Family Insurance Data Science Institute
Space Science and Engineering Center
UW-Madison
Iain’s cross-campus, interdisciplinary work focuses on making computers understand language through Natural Language Processing (NLP). With the Space Science and Engineering Center, he applies NLP to nano-blogging services like Twitter to understand public perception of, and attention to, weather. That understanding will help save lives by shaping more effective public communications to seek shelter in the event of severe weather.
Through the AFI Data Science Institute, Iain works with the UW Institute for Research on Poverty to increase usage of the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core (WADC). The WADC is a collection of data from multiple social service programs that is uniquely cross-referenced to individual people. Every year, WADC incorporates more data. Using NLP, Iain is helping to improve that cross-referencing so researchers can better understand how people use the services offered through different programs. The ultimate goal of this work is to reduce poverty in Wisconsin.
Additionally, Iain is involved in a collaboration with the School of Medicine and Public Health. Using NLP techniques with COVID-19 testing and contact tracing data, he’s helping to identify potential hot spots for virus transmission. Yet another area of work focuses on extracting insights from scientific literature on COVID-19 and other topics. Iain’s work gives him the opportunity to learn and grow every day, in large part because of these productive collaborations.
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.