In July 2020, TDAI welcomed six faculty to its leadership team. Serving as co-directors of TDAI’s Communities of Practice (CoP), these faculty will help lead institute-wide efforts to convene Ohio State faculty with diverse specialties to collaborate on team science and create translational solutions for complex, socially significant challenges.
The five current CoPs include Computational Health and Life Sciences, Computational Social Sciences, Foundations of Data Science & AI, Responsible Data Science, and Smart & Connected Communities and Distributed Sensing. Each CoP focuses on transdisciplinary research; identifying and pursuing funding and publishing opportunities that advance their research agenda; and forging partnerships with industry and community organizations that are similarly committed to contributing to the greater good.
Xia Ning
Xia Ning (Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and Engineering) has joined to co-direct the Computational Health
Shili Lin
& Life Sciences CoP with Shili Lin (Professor of Statistics) and Igor Jouline (Rod Sharp Professor in Microbiology).
The focus of this CoP is to build research teams around various themes in life and health sciences. Each assembled team will include data scientists and experts from various coherent domainareas and will aim to develop big-data analytics that have translational values and can be deployed in healthcare and life sciences.
Sean Downey
Sean Downey (Associate Professor of Anthropology) has joined Bear Braumoeller (Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of
Bear Braumoeller
Political Science) as co-director of the Computational Social Science CoP. This CoP uses computational techniques and big data to address concerns related to human behavior, or to gain insights into social processes that cannot be identified with conventional methods. They hope to facilitate research within the social sciences and team science between disciplines, and to develop methodological tools to evaluate novel theories.
Eric Fosler-Lussier
Eric Fosler-Lussier (Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Biomedical Informatics, and Linguistics) and Yoonkyung Lee (Professor of Statistics and Computer Science and Engineering) are leading the newly
Yoonkyung Lee
expanded Foundations & AI community of practice. This CoP aims to build a community at OSU that focuses on artificial intelligence and the foundation of data science. It will center around the theoretical and algorithmic foundation of data science and use of AI across the data spectrum, with core members spanning across Computer Science, Statistics and Mathematics.
Srinivasan Parthasarathy
Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Biomedical Informatics; Director of Data Mining Research Laboratory; Co-
Caroline Wagner
Director of Data Analytics Major) and Caroline Wagner (Associate Professor, Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs) are both joining Dennis Hirsch (Professor or Law; Faculty Director, Program on Data and Governance) to lead the Responsible Data Science CoP, which launched in April. The focus of this CoP is to conduct collaborative research on data science’s negative externalities and the mechanisms by which society can reduce these harms. This in turn, supports the development of responsible data science.
Anish Arora
Anish Arora (Professor, Computer Science and Engineering) and Rajiv Ramnath (Professor of Practice, Computer Science and Engineering) are co-
Rajiv Ramnath
directing the Smart Connected Communities & Distributed Sensing CoP. This CoP aims to translate data science and engineering for real problems addressing smart campuses, cities, and communities. These efforts proactively engage stakeholders from policy, governance, law, privacy, cybersecurity, outcomes assessment, and/or user communities.
TDAI is grateful for the contributions of our departing CoP co-directors: Igor Jouline, Tamal Dey, David Melamed, and Yusu Wang.
