TRIADS Speaker Series: Rebecca Nugent

Data, Data Everywhere and Not a Drop to Analyze
Speaker: Rebecca Nugent

RSVP

How do we make choices when faced with a health crisis? Or a natural disaster? Data-centric technology and AI are being developed and deployed to help us navigate a new route, summarize large collections of documents, or protect our devices using face recognition, but the gap between autonomous decision-making and human decision-making still exists. We are surrounded by data, but most people are not yet comfortable having data science and/or AI as part of their work or daily lives (even if they’re already using it). Moreover, people tend to make decisions under uncertain, dynamic, and resource-constrained circumstances and often (sometimes unknowingly) incorporate concerns about risk, equity and trust. Tricky to capture in a prediction model. This disconnect is contributing to growing disparities in use across demographic groups and sectors. Data science and AI education have never been more important. 

In this talk, we’ll look at the data science and AI education efforts of two large NSF-funded initiatives centrally housed at Carnegie Mellon University - the NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making and the sports-analytics focused SCORE network to build pipelines and train the public - including K-12, community college, undergraduates, graduate students, and the workforce - to use data science and AI to positively impact society.
 

---

Speaker bio: Rebecca Nugent is the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science and Head of the Carnegie Mellon Department of Statistics & Data Science. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington, her M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Mathematics, Statistics, and Spanish from Rice University. Dr. Nugent is currently on the leadership team for the NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making and has expertise in designing and implementing data science/AI professional development programs for business leaders in industries including health care, finance, automotive/manufacturing, and life sciences. She was the faculty co-director of the Moderna AI Academy and the Founding Director of the Statistics & Data Science Corporate Capstone program, an experiential learning initiative that engages faculty and students with data science problems in industry, non-profits, and government organizations. Dr. Nugent is one of the co-founders of the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center, now in its seventh year of supporting cutting-edge research, sports analytics training and educational programming. Her current research focus is the development and deployment of low-barrier data analysis platforms that allow for adaptive instruction and the study of data science as a science.

 

RSVP