I am a faculty member in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I direct the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory, which I founded in 2000. From 2018 to 2022, I served a term as Director of the Computational Social Science Institute, an interdisciplinary effort at UMass to study social phenomena using computational tools and concepts. From 1991 to 1995, I served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. I received my doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992.
My research focuses on machine learning and causal modeling. I am particularly interested in analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems, with the goals of furthering prediction, explanation, security, and policy decisions. My research is supported by many organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and industrial collaborators.
I regularly serve on program committees for several conferences, including the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the International Conference on Machine Learning, the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, and the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. I currently serve as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. I have also served on the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2005-2013), the Defense Science Study Group (2006-2007), and DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Group (2007-2012). I currently serve on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, the research visioning arm of the Computing Research Association. I received outstanding teaching awards from the UMass College of Natural Sciences in 2011 and from the College of Information and Computer Sciences in 2022. In 2017, one of my papers received the IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award.
Recent News
- Kaleigh Clary was selected for the 2018 Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Summer Fellowship at the University of Chicago.
- Kaleigh Clary was selected as a 2017 CICS Outstanding Synthesis Project Award Winner.
- Akanksha Atrey was selected to attend the CRA-W Grad Cohort for Women Workshop in April.
- Gave a talk at CMU’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy on “Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges for Public Policy.” (2/19/2018)
- Gave a distinguished lecture at the Center for Causal Discovery at the University of Pittsburgh on “The Case for Empirical Evaluation of Methods for Causal Modeling.” (2/15/2018)
- Javier Burroni presented our poster on “Interactive Writing and Debugging of Bayesian Probabilistic Programs” at the Workshop on Probabilistic Programming Languages, Semantics, and Systems. (1/9/2018)
- Kaleigh Clary successfully passed her portfolio exam and entered into candidacy in our PhD program. (12/13/2017)
- Quoted in a New York Times Magazine article as part of my group’s work with the DARPA Explainable Artificial Intelligence program (11/21/2017)
- Hüseyin Oktay successfully defended his dissertation (11/20/2017).
- Katerina Marazopoulou successfully defended her dissertation (7/28/2017).
- Gave a keynote talk at Time and Causality in the Sciences, June 7-9 at Stevens Institute of Technology on “Overcoming the Poverty of Mechanism in Causal Models.”
- A paper I wrote in 2006 with John Burgess, Brian Gallagher, and Brian Levine (“MaxProp: Routing for Vehicle-Based Disruption-Tolerant Networks“) received the 2017 Test of Time Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM on May 1-4 in Atlanta (5/1/2017).
- David Arbour successfully defended his dissertation (2/16/2017).
- Distinguished lecture at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute on “Inferring Causal Models of Complex Relational and Dynamic Systems” (12/9/2016).
- Invited talk at the AAAI-CCC Fall Symposium on Accelerating Science on “Causal Models for Scientific Discovery: Research Challenges and Opportunities” (12/17/2016).
- Gave an invited talk at the UMass School of Public Policy on “The Larger Role of Computational Thinking in Public Policy” (11/7/2016).
- Gave an invited talk at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on “Inferring Causal Models of Complex Relational and Dynamic Systems” (11/15/2016).
- Gave a keynote address at the 26th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming on “Inferring Causal Models of Complex Relational and Dynamic Systems” (9/4/2016).
- David Arbour presented our paper on “Inferring Causal Effects in Relational Data” at SIGKDD 2016 (8/15/2016).
- Dan Garant presented our paper on “Evaluating Causal Models by Comparing Interventional Distributions” at the SIGKDD Workshop on Causality (8/14/2016).