NICO Hosts First Research Jam and Data Science Research Day

NICO hosted two new events in May and June of 2018 to foster the center's collaborative research mission. The NICO Research Jam took place on May 23, 2018 in Chambers Hall, while Data Science Research Day took place on June 25, 2018 at the Norris University Center.

NICO Research Jam

The NICO Research Jam was created as a transdisciplinary research event for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to brainstorm innovative approaches to big research questions that span fields and disciplines. Interest from the NICO student community was impressive, with registrants coming from 10 different disciplines (from political science to neuroscience) in an effort to tackle these research questions.

Participants formed two groups and explored research approaches to two major questions: (i) how do resource constraints affect human migration and (ii) via what process do humans transform a spectrum into categories, such as the transformation of a part of the visible spectrum into "red." The teams came together quickly to ideate possible approaches, data sources, and experiments that could address these questions that drew on all of their backgrounds. At the end, we had presentations, congratulations, and a newfound perspective on how to collaborate on new questions while drawing on expertise from many fields.

Data Science Research Day

Data Science Research Day was a half-day symposium co-organized by the Northwestern Data Science Initiative and attended by 50 participants.  It involved a series of lightning talks, panel discussion, a wearable poster activity, and meet-and greet-sessions. Created as a networking event, this collaboration sought to connect Northwestern undergrads, graduate students, and post doctoral fellows interested in data science.

Data Science Fellows, Data Science Scholars, and students supported by Data Science research grants shared insights on areas such as research reproducibility in computational science, data management and data science challenges, and research communication. Talks were organized into three series: statistics, machine learning, and complex data visualization, but within these subsections, speakers covered diverse topics, from political representation to smartwatch technology to planet detection.

Download the promotional flyer from this event.