March 2023

Welcome to our second issue of the DSS newsletter!  We hope you are all doing well.  As a committee, we view our current role as gathering information about existing data-centric efforts across campus and raising awareness about “data science & society.”  With this in mind, we are excited to share what we are planning and invite you to join.    

DataFest 2023 @ Vassar returns fully in-person for the first time since the pandemic: March 31–April 2, 2023.  Everyone is welcome to be involved – students can register as participants and faculty/staff can volunteer as consultants or judges.  DataFest has been held at Vassar since 2016 and has been generously sponsored by departments and programs across campus.  For the first time this year, DSS is delighted to join as a sponsor.  To learn more about DataFest, visit https://pages.vassar.edu/datafest/.  Are you a faculty/staff interested in volunteering as a consultant or judge?  Contact any of the organizers (Ming An mian@vassar.edu, Simon Hoellerbauer shoellerbauer@vassar.edu, and Lee Kennedy-Shaffer lkennedyshaffer@vassar.edu).  Students can register for free and the deadline is Friday March 3, 2023.  That’s tomorrow, so there’s still time for your students to register!

Department/Program Visits and Listening Sessions.  We are still very much in “listening” mode (or perhaps more appropriately, the data collection phase 🙂) and eager to hear from everyone on campus.  We have reached out to all departments and programs to schedule visits.  The goal of these visits is to learn about existing data science activities and efforts, and learn about where DSS can support existing efforts and what folks would like to see from a DSS initiative.  These visits follow our all-faculty listening sessions that we held in February, where we heard from faculty and staff about exciting data-related efforts across campus.  

DSS Colloquium Series.  Mark your calendars for the following colloquia scheduled for this semester.  We’ll forward more details as they come:

• Friday, April 7 @ 4PM in RH 310, with Kristina Lerman on “Biases in Data & Other Threats to Validity of Predictive Models”
• Friday, April 21 @ 4PM with Anurag Mehra on “Data and Surveillance”

Coming in summer/fall 2023: Technical Workshops.  We are still planning to host hands-on data science workshops for faculty who would like to incorporate more data science into their courses.  These will be open to faculty with all backgrounds of programming.  More information to come.

We’re sending this message to those who have expressed an interest in data science and society at Vassar.  Please feel free to share with others.

Thank you and best wishes!