The Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University is pleased to offer the 3rd Annual Rice Data Science Conference. With this meeting, we invite industry professionals, academics, students and all those interested in the dynamic field of Data Science to gather and learn about exciting recent developments and innovative applications of Data Science. We design this conference to specifically promote networking and collaborations, and we aspire to foster a community which can spark the next great advancements in Data Science.

 

Houston, with its exceptional universities, the Texas Medical Center, NASA, the blossoming energy industry and its rapidly evolving entrepreneurial landscape, is the ideal place for such a meeting. Houston possesses an increasingly technical workforce and has become a destination for data-enabled medicine, science and engineering. Rice itself has contributed to this transformation with its data science initiative that landed new faculty to its campus and other endeavors such as the Data to Knowledge Lab (the D2K Lab) which offers unparalleled opportunities for experiential learning to our students. The Ken Kennedy Institute, in its over twenty-year history, has always been at the forefront of developments in computation and is a community builder and a facilitator of interactions between academia and industry. The Rice Data Science Conference continues this tradition and puts the distinct capability of the Ken Kennedy Institute to connect people at the interface of disciplines at the service of the data science community.

 

The program of this year’s conference reflects the vitality of the field of Data Science. Data Science is continuously evolving driven by research in computer science, statistics, machine learning, optimization theory, signal processing coupled with immense technological advances that enable the capture, maintenance, processing, analysis and communication of massive amounts of data. It is a field where advanced technologists work with domain experts to address complex problems beyond what was thought possible even five years ago. It is also a field where numerous researchers are inspired to invent the next set of methods and technologies to organize and analyze massive amounts of data. Finally, it is a field where developed tools have matured to a level that allows domain experts to master them and employ them in ways that are often unexpected, spurring innovation.

 

The Rice Data Science Conference features nine distinguished plenary speakers from academia and industry and four parallel tracks that encompass method development, applications and practice:

– Data Science Methods and Algorithms

– Data Science Approaches for Energy

– Data Science Approaches for Healthcare

– Data Science Approaches for Public Good

The conference also includes a poster session and plenty of opportunities for networking during the gala at the end of the first day, as well as during the breaks, lunch and the closing poster reception of the second day of the conference. We were excited to receive a large number of abstracts and posters for this conference, and we hope that the selection that you will find in this conference will convince you of the necessity to understand how Data Science is changing our education, our healthcare, the services we have access to and the business sector. The conference has received generous sponsorship from the companies that we acknowledge in our program and we thank them for their partnership and support.

 

On behalf of the entire Program Committee, the Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice University and our sponsors we welcome you to the 3rd Annual Rice Data Science Conference. We hope that you will discover something new for your studies, your profession, or your business. We also encourage you to use our networking sessions to meet the Data Science community that has gathered here, initiate collaborations and join us in making Data Science the backbone of technological innovation in our city, regionally and nationally.

 

Lydia E. Kavraki

Director, Ken Kennedy Institute

 

Jan E. Odedard

Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute