UT Dallas CS Department Participates in the Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference Held at Stanford University
This March, the Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference was held at Stanford University in California as well as at over 100 regional locations nationwide and was available via livestream. The regional sessions were hosted by WiDS Ambassadors. One of the regional sessions was hosted by the UT Dallas CS Department and involved a morning of featured talks by students, industry, and faculty. Dr. Latifur Khan, UT Dallas CS professor, chaired the UT Dallas WiDS event as an ambassador. At the national conference level, Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, the Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI), participated and spoke at three significant events held at Stanford University’s campus.
The Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conferences aim to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and support women in the field. This annual one-day technical conference provides an opportunity to hear about the latest data science-related research and applications in a broad set of domains. This year featured various speakers including Dr. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd, Dr. Lada Adamic, Research Scientist Manager at Facebook, Dr. Elena Grewal, Head of Data Science at Airbnb, Dr. Leda Braga, Chief Executive Officer at Systematica Investments, and UT Dallas’s very own, Dr. Thuraisingham, who all spoke on a broad array of topics ranging from cyber security to astrophysics to computational finance, and more.
WiDS Career Panel featuring Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham at approximately 30 minutes into the video.
Dr. Thuraisingham participated in three events at WiDS. These included a media interview with SiliconAngle, a featured address titled “Integrating Data Science and Cyber Security,” and a career panel moderated by Margot Gerritsen. In her featured address titled “Integrating Data Science and Cyber Security”, Dr. Thuraisingham described research in data science including in-stream data analytics and novel class detection and discussed its applications to insider threat detection. The research in her talk comprised joint efforts between Drs. Thuraisingham, Murat Kantarcioglu, and Latifur Khan.
Dr. Bhavani Thurasingham talks with Lisa Martin at WiDS 2018 at Stanford University (SiliconANGLE)
With the national WiDS Conference and associated live-streaming starting in the Pacific Time zone, the UT Dallas Computer Science Department started earlier and provided UT Dallas attendees with a morning of all local female Data Science speakers who either currently attended, worked for, or graduated from the UT Dallas CS Department. The speakers included Dr. Weili Wu (UT Dallas CS Professor), Ms. Maryam Imani, Dr. Pallabi Parveen, and Dr. Yan Zhou. Ms. Imani, a Ph.D. student of Dr. Latifur Khan, provided a graduate student perspective talk, Dr. Parveen, a former Ph.D. student of Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Principle Big Data Software Engineer at AT&T, gave an industry perspective talk, and finally before tuning in to the Stanford University WiDS livestream, Dr. Zhou, Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu’s research scientist, provided the pre-conference address.
Click here to view more photos from the UT Dallas’s participation in the Global WiDS Conference.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,400 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,000 master’s students, 150 Ph.D. students, 53 tenure-track faculty members and 38 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2017. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.