ACM-IMS Interdisciplinary Summit on the Foundations of Data Science

The ACM-IMS Summit on the Foundations of Data Science will take place in San Francisco on June 15th, 2019. Society increasingly relies on data and computing to create knowledge, to make critical decisions, and to better predict the future. Data Science has emerged as a new field to support these data-driven activities by integrating and developing ideas, concepts, and tools from statistics, computer science and domain fields. Data science now drives fields as diverse as biology, astronomy, material science, political science and medicine, not to mention vast tracts of the global economy, key government activities, as well as quotidian social and societal functions. Intellectually, data science builds on the academic disciplines of computer science and statistics and, in turn, is profoundly impacting both disciplines. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and IMS, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, represent the key scholarly organizations in these areas, and the goal of the meeting is to bring them together to galvanize a new community that secures the foundations of data science.

The Summit represents the launch event for a new ACM-IMS joint venture that has three goals: (1) provide a platform to ensure rich intellectual exchange and collaborations between computer scientists and statisticians; (2) emphasize the central role of data-science practice in informing the data-science research agenda; and (3) highlight the complexity and necessity of responsible data science. For this inaugural event, summit organizers have assembled a program that brings together top-flight scholars and practitioners from the two disciplines. In addition to high-profile keynotes, the program includes panels on deep learning, reinforcement learning, and the role of methods in data science, robustness and stability in data science, and fairness and ethics in data science. The meeting will conclude with a panel discussion on the future of data science. More information can be found at https://www.acm.org/data-science-summit

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