Conference: SDSU Data Science Symposium

South Dakota State University will host the 6th Annual SDSU Data Science Symposium at the SDSU campus from February 5 to 6, 2024. The symposium brings together students, faculty, researchers, and industry professionals who engage in foundational research and applications of data science. This event, held annually since 2018 (excluding 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) includes pre-conference workshops, keynote speakers, parallel oral presentations, undergraduate and graduate student poster presentations and competitions, as well as a career fair.

Historically, more than 200 participants have attended, including students from up to 16 universities and representatives from up to 23 companies. With the 2024 event, this award will help expand both student participation and the number of junior speakers from rural, under-represented, and under-served areas of the Midwest and beyond.

The field of data science is expanding and interdisciplinary involving statisticians, computer scientists, mathematicians, etc. The SDSU-DSS stands out as a unique event in the region, bringing together participants from academia and industry to the Midwest. Parallel session tracks feature speakers from diverse fields such as statistics, mathematics, computer science, healthcare, finance, forensics, precision agriculture, and other data science-related topics.

The symposium facilitates networking, collaborations, and exposes students to various career paths within mathematics, statistics, computer science, and other STEM areas. The symposium aims to 1) bring unique opportunities to the Midwest region, where students, faculty, business leaders of the region, and practitioners all gather to discuss the applications and foundation of data science; 2) provide hands-on, four-hour-long events on emerging topics/tools used in data science; 3) host presentations covering foundational and use-case aspects of data science and garnering interactive discussions and future collaborations 4) expand networks during the career fair and exhibit sessions, connecting faculty, students, and hiring managers of companies in the area.

The presentations and other content will be disseminated through Open PRAIRIE, an open-access institutional repository, ensuring widespread knowledge dissemination. The conference website is www.sdstate.edu/datascience.

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.