Author: DataScience

10Oct

10/10/2019 – Machine Learning Series: Soft-Biometric Attributes Prediction with PyTorch

For this week’s meeting, we are fortunate enough to have Dr. Sebastian Raschka, the No.1 most influential data scientist on GitHub, come in to discuss his research and some ML/DL techniques. Specifically, he will give an introduction to ordinal regression and a brief tutorial on PyTorch. 

Soft-biometric characteristics include a person’s age, gender, race, and health status. As many Deep Learning-centric applications are developed in recent years, the automatic extraction of soft biometric attributes can happen without the user’s agreement, thereby raising several privacy concerns. This talk will introduce how to extract soft-biometric attributes from facial images, as well as how to conceal soft-biometric information for enhancing privacy. 

[SLIDES & DEMOS]

26Sep

09/26/2019 – Fall Kickoff!

Welcome back to campus! If you haven’t done so, officially join the Data Science Club on the Wisconsin Involvement Network. As the school year begins, we are excited to resume hosting workshops, student panels, and seminars to support professional development in data science of our members.

Here are the presentation slides from our kickoff meeting. Feel free to contact us at dotdatauw@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more about the research openings and internship opportunities.

18Apr

04/18/2019 – Local Analytics Opportunities

CoM: The City of Madison will soon be posting their summer internship openings in the coming weeks. Laura Larsen (LLarsen@cityofmadison.com) will let us know when this happens and I will pass along all links and information. 


USGS: The United States Geological Survey has (understandably) reached capacity for their summer interns, but is interested in interns during the semester:”While the USGS Water Data Science team does not currently have internship openings for this summer, we are always seeking motivated individuals. In the past, we have also had interns work part-time throughout the academic year and offered flexible schedules to fit with their class load. It is never to early to start a dialogue about working with us in the future. Please reach out to Lindsay Platt (Data Scientist, lplatt@usgs.gov) or Jordan Read (Chief of Data Science, jread@usgs.gov) to discuss your interest and potential opportunities for the future. If you have more of an interest in pure software engineering, Carl Schroedl (Computer Scientist, cschroedl@usgs.gov) would love to hear from you!”USGS: The USGS has (understandably) reached capacity for their summer interns, but is interested in interns during the semester:”While the USGS Water Data Science team does not currently have internship openings for this summer, we are always seeking motivated individuals. In the past, we have also had interns work part-time throughout the academic year and offered flexible schedules to fit with their class load. It is never to early to start a dialogue about working with us in the future. Please reach out to Lindsay Platt (Data Scientist, lplatt@usgs.gov) or Jordan Read (Chief of Data Science, jread@usgs.gov) to discuss your interest and potential opportunities for the future. If you have more of an interest in pure software engineering, Carl Schroedl (Computer Scientist, cschroedl@usgs.gov) would love to hear from you!”

07Apr

04/04/2019 – Professor Rekatsinas – Data Science Perspective & Research

For last week’s meeting we were fortunate enough to have Professor Rekatsinas (rekatsinas@wisc.edu) come in to discuss his perspective on Data Science. I’d very much encourage you to check out his slides and potentially reach out to him about research opportunities (provided you have programming experience). As we discussed at our research meeting, don’t be afraid to follow up if you don’t hear back in a week!

[PRESENTATION HERE]

26Mar

03/28/2019 – BASH: The Command Line

THIS WEEK:
Shell scripting and being able to use the command line is a critical skill for anyone doing analyses. Many CS students don’t learn how to navigate a terminal until they’re forced to, so it’s definitely a skill worth having. We’ll be joined this week by Professor Tyler Caraza-Harter, who will be leading a workshop on this integral skill.

[DataSci] BASH: The Command Line
Scheduled: Mar 28, 2019 at 6:30 PM
Location: Room 1441, Genetics-Biotech

LAST MEETING:
Right before spring break we met to go over the Do’s and Don’ts of building your résumé. Tech Specialist Amy Yang gave a presentation and discussed keeping a master résumé and customizing it for each company you apply to. She also discussed whether or not you need a cover letter and some caveats for styling your résumé, as well as opportunities for free professional attire. Please see the attach presentation (I promise it’s useful).

14Mar

03/14/2019 – Résumé Workshop (SuccessWorks)

THIS WEEK – Résumé Workshop
Do you have a professional résumé? Are you applying for internships and research labs? This week we welcome tech specialist Amy Yang of UW’s SuccessWorks to do a workshop on presenting yourself to employers. We’ll discuss the Do’s and Don’ts of résumé building.

LAST WEEK – Machine Learning Crash Course
Sorry for the delay. Thanks for coming to the machine learning crash course last Thursday! We had ML PhD Finn Kuusisto discuss a variety of different supervised learning models, specifically Neural Networks, SVMs, Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbor, etc. Finn also gave some insights on graduate study and some specifics about deep learning.


05Mar

03/05/2019 – Machine Learning Overview

THIS WEEK:
Machine Learning Postdoc Finn Kuusisto will be joining us to give an overview of machine learning, specifically focusing on a few common models and their applications! This meeting is meant to acquaint you with some new terminology—it is not meant to go in depth nor discuss the intimate details of implementation.

LAST WEEK:
After last week’s meeting with Dr. Richard Barker, I sent out this interest form. This information has been passed on to the Doc, but if you’d like to continue receiving some additional information, please join the #astrobotany channel of our slack workspace, dotDataGroup.

28Feb

02/28/2019 – Getting into Research; NASA GeneLab!

Thanks for coming to the meeting tonight! Here are the presentation slides on getting into research. The slides have some example/successful emails + general tips about labs. Apologies if tonight’s talk was a bit biology-laden; next week’s lecture should be more computational, as our guest lecturer will be giving an overview of Machine Learning.

TONIGHT’S MEETING
Big thank you as well to Dr. Richard Barker (dr.richard.barker@gmail.com), who was kind enough to come in and discuss his research. He largely discussed his work and the context in which it occurs, as well as some exciting information about NASA. He also mentioned NASA does internships, which, due to the government security clearance, requires you to be an American citizen. While it’s too late in this semester to add on research credits to your schedule, next semester there will be an astrobotany course in which you can enroll and do research! (great résumé builder)

BARKER RESEARCH — [interest form!]
The research-credited course that Dr. Barker mentioned does not yet have a course number or departmental designation. I will let you all know when it does. In the meantime, please fill out the form so that he can reach out to you.

14Feb

02/14/2019 – Spring Kickoff!

[RECAP]

Thanks for coming tonight! Click here for the presentation slides. Major announcement regarding meeting time + frequency:

Meetings will be at 6:30pm every Thursday in Genetics-Biotech room 1441.

This frequency shift is due to the increase in interest from presenters + the number of topics we’d like to cover.
This time shift (later by 30 minutes) is because of room scheduling + some people had class.

CLUB CALENDAR:
We’ve now created a calendar with all meeting information!
[Subscribe here!]

SLACK CHANNEL:
Two different people specifically asked about making a slack group… We actually already have one!
😬 The slack channel is @dotdatagroup, so feel free to join

COMPUTATIONAL MODELING COURSE:
Someone mentioned a biological modeling course they had really enjoyed! If you’re interested, it’s Biochem 570 and the only pre-requisites are Calculus II and any intro bio sequence!

Semester Meeting Schedule (somewhat tentative):
• February 14th — Kickoff 
• February 28th — Getting into Research & NASA GeneLab 
• March 7th — Machine Learning Overview
• March 14th — Résumé Workshop (SuccessWorks)
• March 21st — SPRING BREAK, NO MEETING 
• March 28th — SHELL: The Command Line
• April 4th — TBD (Data Visualization?)
• April 11th — TBD (Git: Version Control?)
• April 18th — TBD (Applying to graduate school?)
• April 25th — TBD (Bring in Researcher to hunt down undergrads?)
• May 2nd — Elections/Wrap-up meeting
07Nov

11/08/2018 – Guest Speaker on ML and Data Mining in Python

Interested in Machine Learning & Data Mining (in Python)? 
On November 8th, we will be having a postdoctoral researcher coming in to speak about his work and some projects he’s completed. Dr. Kuusisto completed his Computer Science PhD in Machine Learning in 2015 at UW-Madison, and works in the Regenerative Biology lab at the Morgridge Institute to build models from genetic expression data that can predict when compounds are toxic to developing neurological tissues.