Registration is Now Open!

The 2025 Delaware Data Science Symposium, an event organized by the UD Data Science Institute, seeks to bring together UD researchers and local partners interested in Data Science applications, theory, and pedagogy across domains. The symposium will be held on October 24th in-person at UD’s Star Campus in the Audion at STAR Tower. Among other activities, the symposium will include a keynote talk by Professor Katie Shilton, a poster session and associated lightning talks, networking opportunities, a panel discussion, and a series of breakout sessions.

Event Details & Registration

Microsoft Pilot event

As part of Data Science Week at UD, please join us for a hands on workshop on Copilot Chat + Agents.

Event Details and Registration

UD Library, Museums and Press Announces Inaugural Open Data Impact Awards

The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, in collaboration with the Data Science Institute and Delaware EPSCoR, is proud to announce a new opportunity to celebrate and advance open knowledge: The Open Data Impact Awards.

This new program recognizes undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, staff and collaborative research teams whose open datasets make a meaningful impact on research, teaching or public engagement.

Three $1,000 awards will be given to individuals or teams whose datasets exemplify excellence in openness, documentation, reusability and potential for scholarly or public impact. Those who believe in the power of open data to drive discovery, deepen learning and spark innovation are strongly encouraged to apply by Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

AI Bots Swarm UDSpace for Information

UDSpace, the University of Delaware’s digital repository managed by UD’s Library, Museum and Press, has massive amounts of high-quality data that is attractive to AI companies. “This is all a testament to the ingenuity and the great lengths that our team has gone to to maintain access to information,” DSI Infrastructure Working Group member Annie Johnson said. “AI is changing the rules, and this is an excellent example of UD Library’s IT team quickly responding with an incredible solution that doesn’t limit our students, faculty, staff, and the global community from accessing the information that UDSpace holds.”

An Emerging Leader in Computing

DSI Faculty Council member Sunita Chandrasekaran, director of the new First State AI Institute at UD, is the recipient of the Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

UD Professor Kyle Davis has studied crops, crop rotation and national farming policies as the world struggles to feed its burgeoning population and use resources smartly amid climate change. Photo courtesy of Kyle Davis.

Examining Food Systems

DSI resident faculty member Kyle Davis (left), an associate professor with joint appointments in UD’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, and a UD alumnus, has been awarded with a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award to continue his research looking at food systems.

Saleem Ali, the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at UD and chair of the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, is the lead author of a new study that suggests the need for an international minerals agreement to ensure countries can produce the green technologies necessary to battle climate change. In this photo, Ali is pictured in the Bayan Obo mining region within the Inner Mongolia region of China in 2017 in front of a massive ore nugget of rare earth minerals which is being celebrated here with the following words: "Welcome to the Rare Earths Community.” Photo courtesy of Saleem Ali

For the Record

Professor Anjana Bhat, DSI affiliated faculty member, was named a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. The fellowship is the highest honor in the PT profession and serves as inspiration for all physical therapists to attain professional excellence.

For the Record

DSI faculty council member Xiao Fang has coauthored a paper accepted to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025, a premier conference in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The paper focuses on detecting large language model (LLM)-generated content and introduces a novel watermarking method called Sampling One Then Accepting (STA-1).

Lighting up Hope

A laser therapy study, supported by UD’s Big Ideas Challenge, is being administered by DSI affiliated faculty member Roxana Burciu (left), assistant professor of kinesiology and applied physiology, and DSI affiliated faculty member John Jeka, professor of kinesiology and applied physiology (not pictured) whose research focuses on Parkinson’s disease (PD). The goal is to improve symptoms by targeting brain regions affected by Parkinson’s, such as the frontal cortex, which supports executive function and memory and helps control motor behavior.

Serving as a nucleating effort to catalyze and coordinate data science initiatives at UD

Coalesce researchers around Data Science research themes
Develop competitive Data Science research programs
Support Data Science and Computing Core Facility
Engage students in Data Science research
Collaborate with government and industry partners

Institutional Strengths

As the vast resource of new and diverse datasets are rapidly becoming available in nearly every aspect of life, data science has the potential to advance human understanding in all branches of science and humanities, and, address grand challenges facing society. The Institute plans to combine disparate, dynamic, and distributed datasets and enable everything from predicting the future behavior of complex systems to precise medical treatments, smart energy usage, and focused educational curricula.

Activities

Resources and Funding Support

Seed funding to support team-based research center grants, infrastructure grants and training grants
Support researchers to identify cross-disciplinary collaborators and access to Data Science & Computing Core Facility
Provide an inventory of data resources, computational tools, and data science-related courses/degree programs

Team Building and Networking

Networking Events: Connecting faculty, students, industry
Annual Research Symposium
Seminars / Distinguished Lecture Series
Research Workshops
Short Courses and Training: Collaborating with academic programs
Industry Engagement: Collaborating with OEIP and Horn Program

Our Mission

The Institute aims to accelerate research in data science, serving as a nucleating effort to catalyze interdisciplinary research collaborations across fields impacting our society.

dsi-info@udel.edu

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ud-data-science/

Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center, Suite 147, 590 Avenue 1743, Newark, DE 19713