Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will speak this Friday at the Association of Data Science and Analytics (ADSA) Data Summit 2016, a tech conference focusing on big data and data science. Organized and hosted by ADSA, an Illinois student group, the event will take place on February 5-6 at the Siebel Center for Computer Science on the Urbana campus.
The conference is free and open to Illinois students, faculty, staff, and the public. Activities will include a career fair, hackathon, tutorials, and lectures. Stodden will deliver her talk, “Reliable Inference in Data Science: Why Should We Care?” on Friday at 5:20 p.m. in room 1404 of the Siebel Center.
Abstract: Troves of data are opening promising new avenues of research in areas as varied as English departments through to industrial research labs. In this talk, I will argue that traditional methods of carrying out and disseminating data driven discoveries produce unreliable and unreproducible results, and suggest solutions that will improve our ability to build and depend on findings in data science. I will motivate examples where reliability fails, define a framework for thinking about data science as a reproducible research enterprise, and give examples of solutions from the tools, policy, and research spaces.
Stodden is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how we can better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her work addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices. At Illinois, she holds affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. Stodden earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University. She also holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Ottawa.