News
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the Record
DSI affiliated faculty member Jennifer Kubota, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, has been nominated president-elect of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS), a leading organization in the neuroscience community.
For the Record
DSI faculty council member Susan Conaty-Buck, assistant professor of nursing and family nurse practitioner, was selected to make two presentations at the 2025 American Association of Nurse Practitioner’s Annual Conference June 18 – 22.
Linked Health Risks
In a first-of-its-kind analysis recently published in the journal JAAC: Advances, DSI affiliated faculty member Tarang Parekh, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences, and colleagues at Houston Methodist Hospital and Harvard Medical School, examined the state-level prevalence of CKM syndrome, using self-reported data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System from 2011 to 2023.
For the Record
DSI affiliated faculty members Tarang Parekh and Daniel Harris recently published a cross-sectional analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey. The findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, underscore the urgent need for disability-inclusive reforms as the nation looks beyond the pandemic.
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.