data science

2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science

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Auditorium 0215 between Buildings 4 & 5

The Statistics Program at KAUST is proud to host the 2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science. This workshop gathers the leading experts on statistical data science to discuss the current needs, challenges and opportunities of modeling massive and high dimensional data, predicting complex biological and physical processes. The workshop will run from November 12-14. Talks and posters presentations will take place in Auditorium 0215 (between Buildings 4 & 5). View Workshop's Agenda.

On Knowledge Graph and Causality for Recommender Systems

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B1 L4 R4214

Knowledge Graph (KG) is a large-scale semantic network consisting of entities/concepts as well as the semantic relationships among them, which could be considered as a concise version of Semantic Web. Recently KG is emerging as a hot topic of knowledge discovery and management under artificial intelligence, facilitating semantic computing. Causal relation is a reflection of user behaviours with backend intention, which is related another emerging hot topic – recommendation interpretability. This talk will cover the recent research progresses in these two areas and highlight some open research challenges in recommender systems.

Random Matrix Theory: Selected Applications from Statistical Signal Processing and Machine Learning

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B1 L4 R4214

Random matrix theory is an outstanding mathematical tool that has demonstrated its usefulness in many areas ranging from wireless communication to finance and economics. The main motivation behind its use comes from the fundamental role that random matrices play in modeling unknown and unpredictable physical quantities. In many situations, meaningful metrics expressed as scalar functionals of these random matrices arise naturally. Along this line, the present work consists in leveraging tools from random matrix theory in an attempt to answer fundamental questions related to applications from statistical signal processing and machine learning.

Digital Health: promises and pitfalls

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B9 L3 R3223

This talk will try to clarify some misconceptions about what digital health (DH) is, and what it should not be.

KAUST-MBSC Invitational Healthcare Analytics and Data Science Workshop

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B3 L5 R5220

The amount of collected medical data and computational power are growing rapidly, which creates new opportunities to impact and improve healthcare by advanced analytics and data science. We aim to bring together practitioners and researchers from across the Kingdom to exchange knowledge and explore possible collaborations. To register, please, fill form here.

Transparent and Robust Causal Inference in Data Science

Carlos Cinelli, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Statistics, UCLA

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KAUST

The past few decades have witnessed rapid and unprecedented theoretical progress in the science of causal inference, ranging from the “credibility revolution” with the popularization of quasi-experimental designs, to the development of a complete solution to non-parametric identification with causal graphical models. Most of these theoretical progress, however, relies on strong, exact assumptions, such as the absence of unobserved common causes, or the absence of certain direct effects. Unfortunately, more often than not these assumptions are very hard to defend in practice. This leads to two undesirable consequences for applied quantitative work in the data-intensive sciences: (i) important research questions may be neglected, simply because they do not exactly match the requirements of current methods; or, (ii) researchers may succumb to making the required “identification assumptions” simply to justify the use of available methods, but not because these assumptions are truly believed (or understood). In this talk, I will discuss new theories, methods, and software for permitting causal inferences under more flexible and realistic settings. These tools empower scientists, and policymakers to both examine the sensitivity of causal inferences to violations of its underlying assumptions, and also to draw robust and trustworthy conclusions from settings in which traditional methods fail.

Designing High-Performance and Scalable Middleware for HPC, AI, and Data Science

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B9 L2 R2322 H1

This talk will focus on challenges and opportunities in designing middleware for HPC, AI (Deep/Machine Learning), and Data Science. We will start with the challenges in designing runtime environments for MPI+X programming models by considering support for multi-core systems, high-performance networks (InfiniBand and RoCE), GPUs, and emerging BlueField-2 DPUs. Features and sample performance numbers of using the MVAPICH2 libraries will be presented. For the Deep/Machine Learning domain, we will focus on MPI-driven solutions to extract performance and scalability for popular Deep Learning frameworks (TensorFlow and PyTorch), large out-of-core models, and Bluefield-2 DPUs.

The KAUST 2022 Workshop on Statistics

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B2 B3 A0215

The workshop will cover current trends in statistics and the statistical modeling of big and complex data. Over four days, it will have talks by leading experts as well as two poster sessions where students and postdocs will present their work. All talks will be given Auditorium 0215, between Buildings 2 and 3 at KAUST. Speakers Aritz Adin (Public University of Navarre) Ahmadou Alioum (Bordeaux School of Public Health) Denis Allard (INRAE) Vera Baladandayupathani (University of Michigan) Emily Hector (North Carolina State University) Eduardo Garcia Portugues (Carlos III University of Madrid)

Towards Neurosymbolic AI: From Knowledge Infrastructure to Explainable Predictions

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B2 L5 R5220

Abstract The increased availability of biomedical data, particularly in the public domain, offers the opportunity to better understand human health and to develop effective therapeutics for a wide range of unmet medical needs. However, data scientists remain stymied by the fact that data remain hard to find and to productively reuse because data and their metadata i) are wholly inaccessible, ii) are in non-standard or incompatible representations, iii) do not conform to community standards, and iv) have unclear or highly restricted terms and conditions that preclude legitimate reuse. These

Scalable Spatial Data Science for Social Scientists

Prof. Amr Magdy

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B4 L5 R5220

The proliferation of spatial data from modern and increasingly prevalent technologies has resulted in large datasets, ripe for extracting insightful knowledge that can drive many applications.

The KAUST 2023 Workshop on Statistics

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B18 R4203

The workshop will feature the latest research on statistical methods and modeling to address real-world challenges in health, environment, and sustainability.

Ph. D. Student Khalil Elkhalil nominated finalist for the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE MLSP Conference

1 min read ·
Fast-placing Machine Learning (ML) is continuously in need of new algorithms, but testing their effectiveness is utterly time-consuming. "Asymptotic Performance Of Regularized Quadratic Discriminant Analysis Based Classifiers," a new paper presented by CEMSE Ph.D. Student Khalil Elkhalil puts ML on the fast gear and a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE MLSP Conference held last September in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.

Lifting up female scientists

1 min read ·
Women in Data Science (WiDS) is like the Global Women's March for analytics; it's a phenomenon too big for just one city. WiDS is the largest data science conference on Earth—taking place in over 50 countries, it has attained more than 100,000 attendees and is tagged as a global movement. The annual conference aims to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide—regardless of gender—and support women in the field. This year's WiDS conference was held at Stanford University with more than 100 regional institutions all over the world participating, including KAUST.

Alumni Feature: Majed Alzahrani

1 min read ·
Working in one of the largest companies in the world is a dream come true for many. For Majed Alzahrani, a former Ph.D. student who worked under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, things couldn't be better. After graduating in 2017, he quickly joined Saudi Aramco as a data scientist in its Drilling Data Science unit.

2019 Statistics and Data Science Workshop

1 min read ·
From November 18 to 20 the KAUST CEMSE Division has hosted the 2019 Statistics and Data Science Workshop. The workshop, organized by Workshop Chair Professor Ying Sun from the KAUST Environmental Statistics Group, featured 17 keynote talks from eminent data science researchers from Asia, Europe, North America and on-campus. Talks included: personalized recommendation by learning from heterogeneous graph data; dynamic spatial panel models; networks, common shocks, and sequential exogeneity; unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo, plus many more.

Joining forces to advance healthcare analytics in the Kingdom

1 min read ·
The recent KAUST-Prince Mohammed Bin Salman College (MBSC) Invitational Healthcare Analytics and Data Science Workshop brought together top-level clinicians, healthcare executives, representatives to discuss digitization and advancement of healthcare analytics in Saudi Arabia.

KAUST STAT students come together for second ASA chapter meeting

1 min read ·
Members of the KAUST American Statistical Association (ASA) student chapter recently came together for the group’s second online meeting held on Tuesday, November 10, 2020. The meeting served as an orientation exercise for new KAUST Statistics (STAT) Program students while also highlighting the shared experience of STAT Ph.D. candidates: Jian Cao, Wanfang Chen, Yuxiao Li, and Gaurav Agarwal.

Raphaël Huser

Associate Professor, Statistics
Professor Huser develops novel statistical methodology and machine learning solutions to model and predict extreme events in various applications ranging from climate and earth sciences to finance and neuroscience.

Noura Alotaibi

Ph.D. Student, Statistics
Noura Alotaibi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Extreme Statistics Research Group (XSTAT) under the supervision of Professor Raphaël Huser. Before joining KAUST, Noura obtained an MSc. degree in statistics from Ohio University, United States. Research interests Noura Alotaibi's research interests focus on Statistics of extremes and applications.

Mohamed Habib Loukil

MS Degree in the Communication Theory Lab (CTL) under the supervision of Professors Mohamed-Slim Alouini and Tareq Al-Naffouri at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Merey Ramazanova

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Merey Ramazanova is a Computer Science Ph.D. Student in Image and Video Understanding Lab (IVUL) Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Bernard Ghanem. Education and Early Career Merey obtained her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2018. She also was a Research Intern at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Okinawa, Japan in 2018. Research Interest She is focusing on her research on data science, computer vision, and machine learning. Education Profile M.S., Computer

Małgorzata Forystek

M.S. Student, Statistics
Statistics Master's student interested in Data Science

Khalil Elkhalil

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Electrical and Computer Engineering
PhD degree candidate of the Electrical Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Jian Cao

Ph.D., Statistics
Jian Cao obtained his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), under the supervision of Professor Marc Genton at the "spatio-temporal statistics and data science" research group. His research focused on Monte Carlo simulation, hierarchical matrices, tile-low-rank matrices, and solving high dimensional multivariate normal or Student-t probabilities. Education and Early Career Ph.D. degree from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Master from Shanghai Jiaotong University Bachelor from University of Science and Technology of China

Eman Abdullah Kabbas

Deeply passionate about Bayesian statistics, Eman Kabbas is a Math/Statistics Lecturer in the General Studies Department at Jubail Industrial College (JIC). Currently, Eman is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences at KAUST, specializing in Bayesian statistics under the supervision of Professor Håvard Rue.

Abdulellah Abualshour

Abdulellah Abualshour is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Bernard Ghanem at the Visual Computing Center (VCC) in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Education and Early Career Abdulellah was chosen to join the KAUST Gifted Student Program (KGSP). He is a graduate of Rutgers University where he received a B.S. degree in Computer Science, with a focus on data science and artificial intelligence. Regarding his early career, Abdulellah did many internships during his studies. In 2015, he worked for 1 year as a Public Relations Officer at Rutgers U niversity in