TRIPODS: Institute for Foundations of Data Science

数据科学正在对科学和社会产生巨大的影响，但它的成功也揭示了阻碍进一步发展的紧迫新挑战。许多机器学习过程产生的结果和决策对数据中的错误和损坏并不健壮；随着对数据隐私的担忧不断加剧，数据科学算法正在产生有偏见和不公平的结果；与解决静态问题的相应工具相比，适合于动态、交互式环境的机器学习系统开发得还不够好。只有借助于数据科学的基础，我们才能理解并应对这些挑战。新成立的数据科学基础研究所（IFDS）以三个TRIPODS第一阶段研究所的工作为基础，汇集了来自华盛顿大学、威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校、加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁斯分校和芝加哥大学的研究人员，围绕解决这些关键问题的目标组织起来。IFDS的成员在TRIPODS的数学、统计学和理论计算机科学学科方面具有互补优势，并通过综合不同领域的知识和经验来推动理论界限的合作记录。IFDS的学生和博士后成员将接受培训，精通多个学科的语言，能够在这些社区之间建立桥梁，并在数据科学基础上进行跨学科研究。为了配合其研究议程，IFDS将通过研讨会、暑期学校和黑客马拉松等方式吸引数据科学界的参与。其多元化的领导层致力于公平和包容，提出了广泛的计划，向传统上代表性不足的群体伸出援手。研究所的治理、管理和评估将建立在第一阶段开发的成功和高效的模型之上。为了解决数据科学研究前沿的关键问题，IFDS将围绕四个核心主题组织研究。复杂性主题将综合来自多个学科的各种复杂性概念，在优化和采样方法的分析方面取得突破，开发评估数据模型复杂性的工具，寻求具有更好复杂性属性的新方法，使复杂性成为理解和发明数据科学算法的更强大工具。鲁棒性主题考虑包含错误或异常值的数据，可能是由于对手，并将设计在这些错误面前具有鲁棒性的数据分析和预测方法。闭环数据科学的主题解决了以有效揭示数据信息内容的方式获取数据的问题，使用利用从过去数据中收集到的信息的战略和顺序策略。关于伦理和算法的主题解决了机器学习中的公平和偏见、数据隐私、因果关系和可解释性等问题。这四个主题在许多方面相互交叉，大多数IFDS研究人员将研究其中的两个或两个以上。通过在这些基本方面取得协调一致的进展，IFDS将降低一些障碍，以更好地理解数据科学方法，提高其有效性和更广泛的应用领域的相关性。此外，IFDS还将组织和举办各种活动，吸引各个级别的数据科学界人士参与。年度讲习班将集中讨论上述关键问题和今后五年肯定会出现的其他问题。全面的外联和教育计划将借鉴第一阶段研究所以往的经验，并利用四个地点的机构资源。与学术界、国家实验室和工业界的领域科学研究人员的合作，对于阐明数据科学基础问题非常重要，将通过IFDS成员可用的许多渠道继续进行，包括那些在TRIPODS+X计划中建立的渠道。与各个IFDS站点的其他研究所的关系将进一步扩大IFDS对领域科学和应用的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Data science is making an enormous impact on science and society, but its success is uncovering pressing new challenges that stand in the way of further progress. Outcomes and decisions arising from many machine learning processes are not robust to errors and corruption in the data; data science algorithms are yielding biased and unfair outcomes, as concerns about data privacy continue to mount; and machine learning systems suited to dynamic, interactive environments are less well developed than corresponding tools for static problems. Only by an appeal to the foundations of data science can we understand and address challenges such as these. Building on the work of three TRIPODS Phase I institutes, the new Institute for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS) brings together researchers from the Universities of Washington, Wisconsin-Madison, California-Santa Cruz, and Chicago, organized around the goal of tackling these critical issues. Members of IFDS have complementary strengths in the TRIPODS disciplines of mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science, and a proven record of collaborating to push theoretical boundaries by synthesizing knowledge and experience from diverse areas. Students and postdoctoral members of IFDS will be trained to be fluent in the languages of several disciplines, and able to bridge these communities and perform transdisciplinary research in the foundations of data science. In concert with its research agenda, IFDS will engage the data science community through workshops, summer schools, and hackathons. Its diverse leadership, committed to equity and inclusion, proposes extensive plans for outreach to traditionally underrepresented groups. Governance, management, and evaluation of the institute will build on the successful and efficient models developed during Phase I.To address critical issues at the cutting edge of data science research, IFDS will organize its research around four core themes. The complexity theme will synthesize various notions of complexity from multiple disciplines to make breakthroughs in the analysis of optimization and sampling methods, develop tools for assessing the complexity of data models, and seek new methods with better complexity properties, to make complexity a more powerful tool for understanding and inventing algorithms in data science. The robustness theme considers data that contains errors or outliers, possibly due to an adversary, and will design methods for data analysis and prediction that are robust in the face of these errors. The theme on closed-loop data science tackles the issues of acquiring data in ways that reveal the information content of the data efficiently, using strategic and sequential policies that leverage information gathered already from past data. The theme on ethics and algorithms addresses issues of fairness and bias in machine learning, data privacy, and causality and interpretability. The four themes intersect in many ways, and most IFDS researchers will work in two or more of them. By making concerted progress on these fundamental fronts, IFDS will lower several of the barriers to better understanding of data science methodology and to its improved effectiveness and wider relevance to application areas. Additionally, IFDS will organize and host activities that engage the data science community at all levels of seniority. Annual workshops will focus on the critical issues identified above and others that are sure to arise over the next five years. Comprehensive plans for outreach and education will draw on previous experience of the Phase I institutes and leverage institutional resources at the four sites. Collaborations with domain science researchers in academia, national laboratories, and industry, so important in illuminating issues in the fundamentals of data science, will continue through the many channels available to IFDS members, including those established in the TRIPODS+X program. Relationships with other institutes at each IFDS site will further extend the impact of IFDS on domain sciences and applications.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.