The University announced their new Data Science Faculty Fellows, who will help lead BU’s Data Science Initiative (DSI). This year’s fellows include the following CAS faculty:
- Mark Crovella, Professor of Computer Science
A member of BU’s Computer Science faculty since 1994 and past department chair, Mark Crovella works to improve the understanding, design, and performance of parallel and networked computer systems – mainly through the application of data mining, statistics, and performance evaluation. His recent work has focused on the analysis of social and biological networks with applications to recommender systems, public opinion analytics, and computational biology. He is an elected fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), holds 10 patents derived from his research, and has published a book and more than 200 widely-cited papers on networking and computer systems. He holds a doctorate from the University of Rochester, a master’s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. - Jonathan Huggins (arriving January 2020), Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics
Jonathan Huggins will formally join the Mathematics & Statistics faculty in January 2020 from Harvard University, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow in biostatistics. Jonathan’s research centers on the development of fast, trustworthy machine learning and AI methods that balance the need for computational efficiency and the desire for statistical optimality with the inherent imperfections that come from real-world problems, large datasets, and complex models. In addition to affiliations with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, he has published over a dozen papers in leading statistics and machine learning journals and conference proceedings. He received his doctorate and master’s degree in computer science from MIT and his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University. - Kate Saenko, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Kate Saenko has been a member of the Computer Science faculty since 2016 and is the director of BU’s Computer Vision and Learning Group, where she specializes in machine learning, concentrating on the development of new systems to enhance vision and language understanding. The recipient of several active federal grants supporting her research into artificial intelligence, she has published extensively in leading computer science journals, serves as program chair for the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and in 2017 received the Most Innovative Solution award, alongside her students, in the IEEE Large-Scale Activity Recognition Challenge. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia.
Professors Crovella and Saenko began their appointments in fall 2019, and Professor Huggins will begin his in January 2020. They are joined by Venkatesh Saligrama, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering in the College of Engineering.
The Data Science Faculty Fellows program began in 2017 to bring together faculty whose scholarship leverages data science methodologies to make advances across the entire academic landscape. They will lead the DSI, which is based out of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, and help build on BU’s vision for research and education in this area.