May 28, 2019
The first annual Northwest Data Science Summit was held on the University of Washington (UW) campus May 7 – 8, 2019, jointly sponsored by the UW eScience Institute and the Data Science Institute at the University of British Columbia (UBC). This unique event brought together over 200 students, faculty, staff, and community members to hear from prominent experts discussing data science methods and applications, as well as to connect with others engaged in data-intensive discovery.
Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, kicked off the first day of the Summit which focused on the use of data science across a wide range of health and neuroscience applications. Keynote presenter Jeff Wilcox, vice president of digital initiatives for Lockheed Martin, led the second day of speakers who showcased the use of data science in engineering and computer science applications. Parallel breakout session on the afternoon of day two allowed participants to choose between focused sessions on Deep Learning, Writing Reproducible Research with R and Markdown, Quantitative Cell Biology and Communities, and Research Computing on Hyak and the Public Cloud.
Industry representatives from more than 10 regional companies attended the Summit, many participating in a networking lunch to discuss recruitment and collaboration opportunities at their respective companies with students, postdocs, and faculty. Contributed lightning talks and posters rounded out the Summit and covered a broader range of topics from building data science communities to reproducible genomics to recurrent nets for language and music.
Congratulations to this year’s Lightning Talk and Poster Award Recipients:
Lightning Talk:
First Place – Hyeju Jang | Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC Computer Science
Honorable Mention – Kristian Eschenburg | Graduate Student, UW Bioengineering
Poster:
First Place – Jacob Filipek | Graduate Student, Paul Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Honorable Mention: Sonia Arora | Graduate Student, School of Engineering & Technology, UW Tacoma
Thank you to all the participants who attended this year’s Summit. Next year the University of British Columbia will be hosting the second annual Northwest Data Science Summit! Mark your calendars for May 7 – 8, 2020!
