School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2018

Computing the social sciences

Yale’s inaugural Data Science Workshop on Computational Social Science, held in October, covered a wide range of topics related to computational data analysis, from how languages spread to ways of improving the value of crowdsourcing. One of the event’s organizers, Dragomir Radev, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, said the event is something that likely would not have happened ten or even five years ago. As the field of data science has picked up speed in recent years, though, it’s become an integral part of numerous fields. Future workshops will focus on how data science and computer science have influenced the digital humanities, medicine, and finance.

Teaching concourse provides central space for labs

President Peter Salovey and School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) dean T. Kyle Vanderlick were among those on hand to dedicate the new Linda and Glenn H. Greenberg Engineering Teaching Concourse. Located beneath Becton Plaza in the center of Yale’s engineering campus, the teaching space includes six new undergraduate teaching labs, along with two wet labs with hoods. The project, funded with a $10 million donation from Glenn Greenberg ’68, brings together labs from all disciplines in engineering—currently scattered over four buildings—into one space. Linda and Glenn Greenberg were in attendance, as were J. Robert Mann ’51E and his wife, Barbara Mann, who donated money for the labs’ equipment.

Professor wins MICCAI award

James Duncan, the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor of Biomedical Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and radiology, received the Enduring Impact Award from the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI). The award is given annually to a senior researcher whose work has made lasting contributions to the field of medical image computing and computer-assisted interventions. Duncan’s work has led to numerous breakthroughs in the field, including tools for tracking types of motion and soft tissue deformation in the heart, and strategies to locate gray matter structures in the brain and anatomical structure near the prostate gland and the liver.