Technology Tools for Advancing Equity: Artificial Intelligence, Accessibility, and Minimizing Misinformation

2022 Awardees and Invited Speakers

Miriam A. Nuño, Public Health Sciences
THE MATH OF SOCIAL CHANGE: TRANSFORMING HEALTH EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes (enough to fill ~58 billion 32 iPads daily) of data in the US. While big data in the context of social problem solving is limited, they can be used to address some of public health most challenging problems. In this talk, I will share some examples of my research on disease surveillance and signal detection for COVID-19, and the health effects of wildfire exposure in California. I will discuss the critical role of community-based participatory research (CBPR) to promote social justice and empower marginalized communities.

Dean Tantillo, Chemistry
NO ONE ACTUALLY NEEDS TO SEE MOLECULES – COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED

An introduction to applied computational quantum chemistry will be accompanied by recent examples highlighting chemical reactions used by plants to construct complex molecules. How such research can be carried out by those lacking sight will then be discussed in detail.

2020 Awardee and Invited Speaker

Jesús A. De Loera, Mathematics
WHEN IS YOUR DATA SUFFICIENT? LET GEOMETRY HELP YOU DECIDE!

More and more data is collected to train artificial intelligence agents. Machine learning models make decisions based on data that, when incomplete or insufficient, may lead to incorrect function (e.g., facial recognition). In this talk I will discuss several examples where geometry and the shape of data are used to decide on the quality of the data. Mathematics can help artificial intelligence systems become more reliable but a fundamental question about the responsibility of the programming and utilization of data requires further examination.

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Tentative Schedule

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Poster Presentations

Title: Bayesian sequential approach to monitor COVID-19 variants through positivity rate from wastewater
Authors: Maria L. Daza-Torres* J. Cricelio Montesinos-López, Yury E. Garcia, Heather N. Bischel, Miriam Nuño

Title: Robust Scattering Feature Extraction from Acoustic Dolphin Wavefields for Sonar Object Classification          
Authors: Wai Ho CHAK*, Naoki Saito

Title: Bayesian sequential approach to monitor COVID-19 variants through positivity rate from wastewater
Authors: Maria L. Daza–Torres*,  J. Cricelio Montesinos-López, Cesar Herrera, Yury E. García, C. Winston Bess, Heather N. Bischel,  and Miriam Nuño

Title: Elucidating the structural features of viral proteins using Cryo-EM and protein folding software
Authors: Michael Keith*, Tamara Christiani

Title: Gröbner bases and Markov Chains on graphs with degree and colored balance conditions       
Authors: Felix Almendra Hernandez*, Jesus De Loera, Sonja Petrovic

Title: Finding Minimal Step Conformations of Biological Two-Component Links   
Authors: Jonathan Chang, Jacob Lusk, Mariel Vazquez, Gabriel Freund, Shawn      

Title: The Monogenic Image on the 2-Torus
Authors: Brian Knight*, Naoki Saito

Title: Novel Resolution of Singularities within Point Cloud Data using TDA
Authors: *Greg DePaul and Erik Carlsson

Title: Toward orbit recovery for cryo-electron microscopy: over-complete tensor decomposition for projected multi-reference alignment
Authors: Tait Weicht*, Albert Fannjiang, Alex Wein

Title: Determining Immune response profile from RNA-seq data
Authors: *Inglis tucker, Elizabeth Hammond

Title: High knotting probability in helical DNA liquid crystal filaments
Authors: Zhijie Wang*, Tamara Christiani, Pei Liu, M. Carme Calderer, Mariel Vazquez, Javier Arsuaga

Title: Dynamic Wireless Resource Management and Transceiver Adaptation for Efficient Spectrum Utilization and Coexistence
Authors: Yu-Chien Lin*, Prof. Zhi Ding

Sponsors

• UC Davis Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• UC Davis Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS)
• UC Davis TETRAPODS Institute of Data Science (UCD4IDS) and the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR): Transdisciplinary Research In Principles Of Data Science (TRIPODS) Phase I grant: CCF-1934568

Organizing Committee

• Mariel Vazquez, Mathematics and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS)
• Naoki Saito, Mathematics, Director of the UC Davis TETRAPODS Institute of Data Science (UCD4IDS)
• C. Titus Brown, Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine; DataLab Faculty Director for Community Initiatives
• Linda Bisson, Viticulture and Enology (Emerita)

About the ADVANCE Scholar Award

The ADVANCE Award Symposium celebrates the contributions made by three ADVANCE awardees, and presents an opportunity for the UC Davis community to join together around the awardees’ research and commitment to mentoring, social impact and public outreach. In this event we will discuss technologies to improve accessibility, algorithms that prevent bias and how to involve community partners to empower marginalized groups. There will be three plenary talks, a poster session and ample time for discussion. We hope you will join us!

The ADVANCE Award is available for mid-career and senior UC Davis faculty who advance diverse perspectives and gender equity in STEMM through their teaching, research and service. Find details below about the Advance awardees who will be featured in this event.

Read the 2022 Announcement

Read the 2021 Announcement

Read the 2020 Announcement