With Purdue and partner universities primarily closed for the semester and almost everyone working isolated at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we wanted to do something to connect everyone in the emerging field of science of information with some of the research happening right now in the CSoI”, said Wojciech Szpankowski, Director of the Center for Science of Information (CSoI), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center based at Purdue University. The Center has organized a Spring Virtual Seminar Series that will highlight ongoing research by several of CSoI’s postdoctoral scholars and graduate students, remarked CSoI education director, Brent Ladd, “The talks will present advances in our core areas incorporating information theory and data science and especially applications to other domain areas from several of our active student-led research teams”.

The seminar lineup kicks off Tuesday, April 7 at 2 PM (EDT) with a timely special presentation on modeling the COVID-19 virus spread and scenarios from Indiana data by Center Postdoctoral Fellow, Jithin Sreedharan. Dr. Sreedharan relays, “I will be showing different methods people use to model COVID-19, and then show how the spread changes in Indiana under different artificial scenarios like more random testing, more people in quarantine, and a prolonged stay-at-home order.”

We will continue the next day, Wednesday, April 8, at 2 PM (EDT) with Center Postdoc Fellow Mohsen Heidari presenting collaborative research in machine learning with a Fourier-based framework for feature selection and supervised binary classification. “ In learning datasets with a large number of attributes, feature selection has been an effective solution to reduce running time, improve learning accuracy, and facilitate a better understanding of the learning model. I’m looking forward to introducing the group to our methods and findings,” said Dr. Heidari.

The seminars will run every other Wednesday at 2 PM (with exception of the COVID-19 modeling talk on Tuesday, April 7). Full details with the online link to connect to the virtual seminars are available at the Center’s website:

https://soihub.org/news-and-events/calendar/science-of-information-spring-2020-seminar-series-join-us-online/

Bob Brown, CSoI managing director, described that the Center has enjoyed a cohesive group of researchers with over 200 student and faculty members involved across eleven university partners and beyond during the past nine-plus years. “The seminars will focus on several of our young scholars based primarily at Purdue and their collaborations with research members in CSoI and beyond.”

Seminars scheduled at this time include:

1. April 7, 2 PM,
   Special COVID-19 Modeling Talk with Jithin Sreedharan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Science of Information, Purdue University.
   Topic: “Modeling COVID-19 Spread: Scenario Studies from Indiana Data”
   Canceled, stay tuned for a potential new date and time​
   
2. April 8, 2 PM
   Mohsen Heidari, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Science of Information, Purdue University.
   Topic: “Feature Selection for Supervised Binary Classification”
   
3. April 22, 2 PM
   Earth Day Talk by Jonathan Knott, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Forestry, Purdue University and CSoI Student Research Team Leader.
   Topic (tentative): “Big Data Applications for Quantitative Ecology”.
   
4. May 6, 2 PM
   CSoI Ph.D. Student Research Team: Genea Stewart and Cary Jim, North Texas University, Milushka Elbulok-Charcape, CUNY, Tessa Pham, CSoI Undergraduate Channels Scholar, Byrn Mawr College.
   Topic: “Data Science Methods for Cross-National Exploration of Secondary Math Teacher Preparation”
   
5. May 20, 2 PM
   Lina Aboulmouna, Ph.D. Candidate, and Rubesh Raja, Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Science of Information, Chemical Engineering, Purdue University. Topic (tentative): “Information Theory for Systems Biology”.
   
   

Seminar Series Contact:

Brent T. Ladd,
Director of Education,
Center for Science of Information, laddb@purdue.edu