About Us

The Data Science Club at UW-Madison is an inspirational place to begin exploring the endlessly growing field of Data Science. The field incorporates computer science, statistics and all other fields involving data. We aim to connect, educate, and inspire students across campus, helping them understand how data science fits into their unique interests and careers. Our meetings range from seminars & talks to study groups to semester-long projects, and other opportunities to get students engaged outside of the class room. All levels of expertise are welcome.

We host three main types of events: Industry, Skill and Networking/Social events throughout the semester. Industry events involve interdisciplinary topics spanning finance, biology, sports, public health, and more. Our skill events and workshops are led by University faculty, professionals with Data Science experience or club board members. We explore many tools such as Hadoop, Scala, Python, statistics, Tableau, and TensorFlow in a social, hands-on approach. Together, we find and share such interesting new data technologies and resources to then share. We provide a space for students to network with faculty, companies, and each other on new ventures, from Kaggle competitions to semester-long research projects to internships and jobs help.

Some of the topics include:

  • Physical science applications
  • Marketing & business analytics
  • Python, R, SAS
  • Data warehousing & engineering
  • Bayesian Statistics, Probability
  • Data collection & cleaning
  • Computer security analytics
  • Social network analysis
  • Bioinformatics
  • Machine Learning, Computer Vision, NLP, Deep Learning
  • Kaggle competitions and datasets

Starting in 2021, we host annual data hackathons to give all students the opportunity to build data solutions to complex world problems in a welcoming environment.

If you’re a UW student, faculty, or professional interested in discussing Data Science, we’d love to have you. Knowledgeable individuals with expertise in the similar areas (or something completely different) are welcome to schedule speaking opportunities with us. Please use our contact form!

History

In the spring of 2018, juniors Matthew Wolff and Adithya Murali founded the Data Science Club, serving as the President and Vice President, respectively. A few months later, they became aware of a defunct club from 2016—it had been a short-lived club focused on data science, going dark after its founding members became inundated with applying for post-graduation opportunities. The inactive club was reactivated and merged with Data Science Club—dotData became the club nickname and the dotdatascience.org domain was inherited.

Officially kicking off in Fall 2018, Data Science Club gained traction in the UW-Madison community with nearly 170 students joining its mailing list in September. It met four times in this first semester, with attendance averaging 20-30 at each meeting.

The club even aided the University in developing the nascent Data Science major (arriving Fall 2020) by polling students and discussing potential courses with senior faculty! With its founding members graduating in spring 2019, club leadership passed the mantle to the next wave of fledging data scientists led by Lareina.

The club shifted gears when Gautam & Eliot grabbed the helm of affairs in Fall 2020 and helped the club swell up to 500 students. After Spring 2021, membership had risen to ~600. The frequency of meetings consequently became weekly, with their focus being on:

  •     faculty members coming in to discuss their research and recruit students
  •     foster a community amongst members
  •     developing a professional résumé and getting involved with research
  •     workshops on popular data science tools
  •     discovering Machine Learning through a seminar led by a postdoc
  •     local companies coming in to discuss analytics internships and other opportunities

In the Spring of 2022, DotData hosted its first-ever datathon! Learn more. The club started hosting a new event called “MadData”. Similar to the datathon it has found success with hundreds of participants over the past two years.

As of October 14, 2024, this is the complete history of the UW Data Science Club.