The UBC Data Science Institute is excited to fund a collaboration between Drs. Elodie Portales-Casamar (UBC Department of Pediatrics) and Giuseppe Carenini (UBC Computer Science) titled, "Robust, transferable and interpretable natural language processing of psychiatric clinical notes." The team includes postdoctoral fellow Dr. Ahmed Abura'ed, Dr. Ali Eslami (UBC Department of Psychiatry), and Ali Mussavi Rizi (PHSA).

Drs. Naomi Zimmerman (UBC Mechanical Engineering) and Amanda Giang (UBC Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability) were awarded funding for their pilot project “Optimal placement of low-cost air quality sensors in Metro Vancouver to better predict air quality exposure”. This project seeks to develop efficient models for monitoring and predicting air quality in urban centres by leveraging anonymized 5G mobile location data with weather and air quality surveys.

Drs. Christos Thrampoulidis and Mark Schmidt are teaming up to address unresolved challenges in the training of neural networks and its applications. With this postdoctoral funding award from the Data Science Institute, the team will combine their expertise in optimization and high-dimensional statistical learning theory to design more efficient training algorithms that are better suited for real-world use.

A team of UBC and SFU researchers led by Dr. Nadja Kunz was awarded DSI postdoctoral matching funds for their project that will examine the impacts of mining on the environment. Specifically, the team will build advanced statistical models using newly available data sets to better understand how mining is influencing hydrological variability, wildfires, and other environmental disturbances in Canada.

A two-year NSERC Alliance grant was recently awarded to a consortium of two University of British Columbia research clusters--the Composite Research Network and Data Science Institute--for their project "Data Science & Composite Materials Manufacturing". This project aims to apply breakthroughs in data science, machine learning, and probabilistic programming to innovate and accelerate manufacturing and design of composite materials, specifically for the aerospace sector.

Drs. Tamara Munzner and Kendall Ho were award DSI funding for their project, "Visual Analytics Support for the HEiDi Virtual PHysician COVID-19 Deployment." This project will leverage advances in data visualization and analytics to optimze the delivery of telehealth care to patients stricken with COVID-19. The outcomes will help health system experts to gain a holistic snapshot of the current care system and expedite analysis and decision-making.