Keynote speaker: Terri McAllister, Community Resilience Group Leader and Program Manager NIST
The MICDE 2019 Symposium will feature eminent scientists from around the world and the U-M campus.
Do you have experience in working alongside community partners in data analysis or program evaluation? Do you want to connect with others who are using their skills for public good? National efforts from organizations such as DataKind, Data Science for Social Good, and Statistics without Borders have been expanding in recent years as more individuals recognize their potential to impact social change. Great things can happen when individuals are empowered to dedicate time, resources, and knowledge to the pursuit of public good. Whether we work in the foreground or the background, we can all contribute to improving the lives of those around us.
Statistics in the Community (STATCOM), in collaboration with the Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) and the Community Technical Assistance Collaborative (CTAC), invite you to attend the 2nd Annual Data for Public Good Symposium hosted by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). The symposium will take place on Tuesday, February 19, 2019 and will showcase the many research efforts and community-based partnerships at U-M that focus on improving humanity by using data for public good. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
10:30 – 11:30: Presentations
- Partners for Preschool: The Added Value of Learning Activities at Home During the Preschool Year, Amanda Ketner, School of Education
- University-Community Partnership to Support Ambitious STEM Teaching: Leveraging University of Michigan expertise in education, research, and evaluation to support innovative, interactive teaching across the S.E. Michigan region and beyond, C. S. Hearn, Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER)
- Open Data Flint, Stage II, Kaneesha Wallace, MICHR
- Research-Practice Partnerships at the Youth Policy Lab, A Foster, ISR Youth Policy Lab and School of Education
- The LOOP Estimator: Adjusting for Covariates in Randomized Experiments, Edward Wu, Statistics
11:30 – 01:00: Lunch/Poster Session
01:00 – 02:00: Presentations
- Barrier Busters: Unconditional Cash Transfers as a Strategy to Promote Economic Self-Sufficiency, Elise Gahan, School of Public Health
- Implementing Trauma-Informed Care at University Libraries, Monte-Angel Richardson, School of Social Work
- Why did the global crude oil price start to rise again after 2016?, Shin Heuk Kang, Economics
- Poverty and economic hardship in Michigan communities: Data from the Michigan Public Policy Survey (MPPS), Natalie Fitzpatrick, Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy
- Understanding Networks of Influence on U.S. Congressional Members’ Public Personae on Twitter, Angela Schopke, Chris Bredernitz, Caroline Hodge, School of Information
02:00 – 02:30: UM Student Organization Presentations
02:30 – 04:30: Workshop Debrief & Closing
About the Organizers: STATCOM is a community outreach organization offering the expertise of statistics graduate students – free of charge – to nonprofit governmental and community organizations. CTAC is a community-university partnership convened to serve a universal need identified by community partners around data and evaluation. CEDER is a School of Education center devoted exclusively to offering high-quality designs, evaluations, and research on teaching, learning, leadership, and policy at multiple levels of education. This symposium is part of our effort to bring together university organizations that promote similar ideals and individuals whose research provides a service for the greater good.
Questions: Please contact salernos@umich.edu.
Data-intensive social science is one of the research focus areas that MIDAS supports with its Challenge Awards. Our long-term goal is to support this research area more broadly, using the Challenge Award projects as the starting point to build a critical mass. This symposium offers a platform for all participants to explore collaboration opportunities and aims to attract more researchers to our hub. The two Challenge Award teams will give in-depth presentations, and all participants are encouraged to submit posters on research related to data-intensive social science.
Registration | Poster submission form (Due Monday, Sept. 10)
Preliminary Schedule:
9 am: Introduction
9:05 am to 11:35 pm: Challenge Award presentations
- Computational Approaches for the Construction of Macroeconomic Data, Matthew Shapiro and team
- A Social Science Collaboration for Research on Communication and Learning Based upon Big Data, Michael Traugott and the UM-Georgetown team
11:35 am to 1 pm: lunch, poster session and networking (Please fill out this form to submit a poster; deadline is Monday, September 10)
1 to 2 pm: Panel discussion: the future of data-intensive social science research at U-M
- Martha Bailey, Professor, Economics, University of Michigan
- Sara Heller, Assistant Professor, Economics, University of Michigan
- Matt Shapiro, Professor, Economics, University of Michigan
- Lisa Singh, Professor, Computer Science, Georgetown University
- Mike Traugott, Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies, Political Science, University of Michigan
Approximately 50 posters from post-docs and graduate students across campus entered the Poster Competition at the 2018 MICDE Symposium on March 22, 2018. We’re proud to announce the winners:
- First Place ($500): “Modeling and Enhanced Sampling of Protein-Protein Recognition,” Yanmin Wang, Chemistry
- Second Place ($300): “Non-Newtonian Computational Model of Thrombosis Initiation,” Sabrina Lynch, Biomedical Engineering
- Third Place ($200): “Computational Modeling of Particle-Laden Flows,” Gregory Shallcross, Sarah Beetham, and Yuan Yao, Mechanical Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “UM/LISA: Efficient Linear and Nonlinear Guided Wave Simulation,” Hui Zhang, Aerospace Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “Temperature-Dependent Green’s Function Methods for Electronic Structure Calculations,” Alicia Welden, Chemistry
- Honorable Mention: “Non-invasive Diagnostics of Coronary Artery Disease using Machine Learning and Computational Fluid Dynamics,” Kritika Iyer, Biomedical Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “Automated Diagnosis and Prognosis System for Traumatic Brain Injury Patients with Subdural Hematoma,” Negar Farzaneh

Last April 10, at the 2019 MICDE Symposium, graduate students and postdocs presented 46 posters representing 16 departments from all over campus. We’re proud to announce the winners:
- First Place ($500): “Evaluating vaccination strategies for tuberculosis in endemic and non-endemic settings”, Marissa Renardy, Microbiology and Immunology
- Second Place ($300): “Efficient analysis of particle simulations with freud”, Vyas Ramasubramani, Chemical Engineering
- Third Place ($200): “Demographics and the Turing effect: uncovering self-organized spatial structure in a sessile population”, Zachary Hajian-Farooshani, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
- Honorable Mention: “Probabilistic learning of linear embedding in the nonlinear dynamical system“, Shaowu Pan, Aerospace Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “Image-Based Computational Models of Thrombus Initiation“, Sabrina Lynch, Biomedical Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “Numerical modeling of charged aerosols in atmospheric turbulence“, Yuan Yao, Mechanical Engineering
- Honorable Mention: “Treecode Fast-Summation Methods in the 3D Reference Interaction Site Model“, Leighton Wilson, Interdisciplinary and Applied Mathematics
Please join us for the 2017 Michigan Institute for Data Science Symposium.
The keynote speaker will be Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and best-selling author of “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.”
Other speakers include:
- Nadya Bliss, Director of the Global Security Initiative, Arizona State University
- Francesca Dominici, Co-Director of the Data Science Initiative and Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Daniela Whitten, Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics, University of Washington
- James Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas
More details, including how to register, will be available soon.
Talks from the 2017 MICDE Annual Symposium are now available on the Advanced Research Computing YouTube channel.
Due to technical difficulties, the afternoon sessions (Emanuel Gull and J. Tinsley Oden) were not recorded.
The videos can be viewed at http://myumi.ch/J2j33
Three winners of the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) Poster Competition, held at the MICDE Annual Symposium, were announced April 7, 2016.
They are:
First place – Elizabeth Hou, Statistics (A. Hero), LSA
“Latent Laplacian Maximum Entropy Discrimination for Detection of High-Utility Anomalies”
Second place – Doreen Fan and J. Brad Maeng, Aerospace (P. Roe), CoE
“Is there a better way to solve conservation laws?”
Third place – Rose Cersonsky, Macromolecular Science and Engineering (S. Glotzer), CoE
“Understanding Spatial Packing via Variable Shape”
Approximately 50 posters took part in the competition. The winners were chosen by a vote of symposium attendees.