The focus of the day was to share the latest developments in data science research at the University of Amsterdam, AUMC (Faculty of Medicine), ACTA (Faculty of Dentistry), and beyond. More than 100 people attended this year’s sold-out event, either in-person at Startup Village or via the online livestream.

Morning workshops

The day kicked off with two interactive workshops for UvA PhD students and staff.

Workshop 1: Meta-analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM)
Workshop instructor: Suzanne Jak

Workshop participants learned the basics of MASEM and got practical experience with fitting MASEM models using the dedicated online app webMASEM.

Workshop 2: A crash course in machine learning using JASP
Workshop instructors: Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Koen Derks, Don van den Bergh

Workshop participants became familiarised with JASP software for statistics, and learned how JASP can help with the execution and interpretation of complex analyses.

Afternoon programme:

Data science across disciplines – DSC member pitch presentations

17 Data Science Centre community members from 6 faculties gave lightning pitch presentations on how they are applying data science methods to address a range of different questions - from how to better understand the history of early globalization and colonisation, to why people follow and break rules, to growing tomatoes!

DSC pitch presenters and topics:

• Tessa Blanken (Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences: Psychological Methods): Human Behaviour Simulation – the NEMO project
• Niklas Müller (Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences: Brain & Cognition): Inductive biases in neural processing
• Susan Vermeer (Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences: Political Communication & Journalism): Impact of digital media environment on political behaviour and attitudes
• Marthe Möller (Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences: Youth & Media Entertainment): Data science & entertainment communication
• Joanna Strycharz (Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences: Persuasive Communication): Data science methods in persuasive communication
• Melvin Wevers (Faculty of Humanities): CANAL: Amsterdam Cultural Analytics Lab
• Leon van Wissen (Faculty of Humanities): Understanding the history of early globalisation and colonialism
• Gaby Lunansky (Faculty of Law): Why do people follow or break the rules?
• Noé Furet (Faculty of Law; Informatics Institute): Using data science methods to identify legal issues in decentralised systems
• Claudia Orellana-Rodriguez (Amsterdam Business School): Data analytics for good: Applying analytics for the advancements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Shubha Guha (AI for Retail AIR Lab): Data quality & fairness: Impact of automated data cleaning on fair decision making
• Shuai Wang (Amsterdam Business School; Informatics Institute): Innovation genome: Discovering the secret ingredients of successful innovations using geometric deep learning and visual analytics
• Max van Spengler (Informatics Institute: VIS Lab): Hyperbolic geometry in computer vision
• Katinka Rus (Faculty of Dentistry): AI models for clinical use
• Fred White (Faculty of Science: Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): Simulation and methods testing in designed omics data
• Frans van der Kloet (Faculty of Science: Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): Computer vision and deep learning
• Marc Galland (Faculty of Science: Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): Tomato Machine Learning

Data science eco-system at UvA

We then heard presentations from other key organisations within UvA’s data science eco-system, starting with the Institute for Advanced Study whereby Davide Ceolin presented on his research to date as the first IAS/DSC fellow. This was followed by talks given by our partners at Amsterdam Data Science, Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and Startup Village.

Keynote presentations:

Keynote 1: Fantastic Dnimals and where to find them: Understanding deep learning models
presented by Steven Scholte, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam

Steven’s field of research is in visual perception. He works on a solution to integrate 2D point-sampled visual information into meaningful perception. His research covers topics such as grouping, segmentation and object recognition.

In his keynote address, Steven talked about how the brain learns the statistics representation of the world, and how such models can be treated in a way similar to biological animals (such as humans). Steven gave examples to illustrate that it is possible to obtain a good level of understanding of these high parameter models that are optimised for predicting object categories. This helps us to, at the same time, understand the functions implemented in DNNs and the mechanisms used by biological animals to solve these tasks.

Keynote 2: Who does this interface think you are?
presented by Anne Beaulieu, Professor of Knowledge Infrastructures and Director of the Data Research Centre at the University of Groningen

Anne’s research and teaching provides insights into how data is created, synthesized and transformed into evidence. Anne also studies how databases, platforms and data flows shape what we know and who has access to this knowledge.

In her keynote address, Anne asked the audience to consider what happens when we explore the interface as an important space of action that shapes what we do, as well as how and what we know with data. Anne spoke about what it means to approach interfaces as practices rather than as devices, and how interfaces have the potential to shape relations between humans, machines and more-than-humans, and to sustain new civic epistemologies, beyond control and calculation.

Recordings of afternoon programme

Contact us!

If you have any questions about the event, or the Data Science Centre, please contact us at dsc@uva.nl.