UVA Data Points

In this episode we’re looking at the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence in higher education.

To explore this topics we’re featuring a conversation between Phil Bourne, the dean of the UVA School of Data Science, and Jeffrey Blume, the Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs, also at UVA Data Science.

Jeffrey and Phil discuss the recent trends in artificial intelligence and they look at how this will impact the student experience, the faculty and staff experience, and the research landscape in higher education.

Before diving into the complex world of data science it seemed to wise to establish a shared definition of the field. Here at the UVA School of Data Science, we have defined data science with the 4 + 1 Model. This model serves an outline for the first series of UVA Data Points. It also serves as a guiding definition within the School of Data Science, touching everything from research to course planning.

In this introduction trailer, host Monica Manney discusses the history, development, and function of the 4 + 1 Model of Data Science with its main author, Raf Alvarado.

Below is a brief expect from An Outline of the 4 + 1 Model of Data Science by Raf Alvarado:

“The point of the 4 + 1 model, abstract as it is, is to provide a practical template for strategically planning the various elements of a school of data science. To serve as an effective template, a model must be general. But generality if often purchased at the cost of intuitive understanding. The following caveats may help make sense of the model when considering its usefulness when applied to various concrete activities.

The model describes areas of academic expertise, not objective reality. It is a map of a division of labor writ large. Although each of the areas has clear connections to the others, the question to ask when deciding where an activity belongs is: who would be an expert at doing it? The realms help refine this question: the analytics area, for example, contains people who are good at working with abstract machinery. The four areas have the virtue of isolating intuitively correct communities of expertise. For example, people who are great at data product design may not know the esoteric depths of machine learning, and that adepts at machine learning are not usually experts in understanding human society and normative culture.

Each area in the model contains a collection of subfields that need to be teased out. Some areas will have more subfields than others. Although some areas may be smaller than others in terms of number of experts (faculty) and courses, each area has a major impact on the overall practice of data science and the quality of the school’s activities. In addition, these subfields are in an important sense “more real” than the categories. We can imagine them forming a dense network in which the areas define communities with centroids, and which are more interconnected than the clean-cut image of the model implies.

The areas of the model are like the components of a principal component analysis of the vector space of data science. They capture the variance that exists within the field, and, crucially, provide a framework for realigning (rebasing) the academy along a new set of axes. One effect of this is to both disperse and recombine older fields, such as computer science, statistics, and operations research, into new clusters. Thus we separate computer science subfields such as complexity analysis and database design. One possible salutary result of this will be the formation of new syntheses of fields that share concerns but differ in vocabularies and customs..."

This bonus episode features a conversation between Lane Rasberry, Wikimedian-In-Residence at the UVA School of Data Science, and Lloyd Sy, a Ph.D. candidate in the UVA Department of English. In this conversation, Lane and Lloyd take a deep dive into the expansive world of Wikidata and ask the existential question, "What makes a person a person?" Or, more specifically, what data points make up a person? To help answer this question, Lloyd developed a large-scale data model of the biographical data contained within the Wikidata platform. This project serves as the foundation for their conversation. They also take a wide view of biographical data as it pertains to research and academia, including the process of gathering the data, the ethics of utilizing the data, personal ownership of the data, and much more. Anyone interested in these concepts should find this discussion valuable.

Links:

WikiProject Biography

Music:

"Screen Saver" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

UVA Data Points sits down with Cathy O'Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, and Brian Wright, Assistant Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia. The candid dialogue ranges from O'Neil's new book The Shame Machine to her work as an algorithm audit consultant. The two also draw comparisons between data science problems and knitting, as well as discuss educating future data scientists.

Links:

https://mathbabe.org (Cathy O'Neil's website)

https://datascience.virginia.edu (UVA School of Data Science website)

Books mentioned:

The Shame Machine

Weapons of Math Destruction

Here we explore how data science is revolutionizing our understanding of protein structures, with a special focus on the exciting developments in protein folding and evolution. We’re joined by two experts in the field: Philip Bourne, the founding dean of the UVA School of Data Science, and Cam Mura, a biomolecular data scientist. From new tools like DeepUrfold to the future of biomedical applications, Bourne and Mura provide a unique look into how cutting-edge technology is transforming the world of molecular biology.