July 11, 2019
Featured on datanami.com: KDD 2019 to Rally Big Data Experts Around the Environment on Its First ‘Earth Day’
January 19, 2018
Vipin Kumar delivered the Inagural Headwaters Lecture at the Water Resources Assembly and Research Symposium
August 23, 2017
An article in Nature News cites research from the expeditions project on automatic discovery of teleconnections in climate, titled: How machine learning could help to improve climate forecasts.
June 16, 2017
Expedition research: The Promise of Big Data in Understanding Climate Change is featured in the latest volume of Healthy Generations, from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. The 74-page volume, Climate Change and Public Health, contains articles by national and local experts about the science of climate change, climate change preparedness, vulnerability to climate change, health effects, assessment, communication, and resilience.
April 8, 2017
Research from the expeditions project is the highlight in this article from Sierra Club: The "Big Science" Behind Climate Change.
November 13-18, 2016
Vipin Kumar was the 2016 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, which was presented at the SC16 Conference in Salt Lake City in November.
August 23, 2016
The National Science Foundation highlighted the accomplishments from the expedition project Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach in an article titled "Using data to better understand climate change".
August 14, 2016
Expeditions researchers Vipin Kumar (PI) and Shashi Shekhar (Co-I) were organizers for the Workshop on Data Science for Food, Energy and Water at KDD2016.
July 20, 2016
Expeditions researcher Vipin Kumar (PI) was a keynote speaker, presenting Big Data in Climate: Opportunities and Challenges for Machine Learning at the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Pisa, Italy.
December, 2015
Expeditions researchers Vipin Kumar (PI), Shashi Shekhar (Co-I), and James Faghmous (PhD) are guest editors for the Computing in Science and Engineering Special Issue, Computing in Climate, which focuses on data-driven research and climate.
October 29-November 1, 2015
Regent Professor Vipin Kumar was appointed as a conference Co-Chair for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
June 17, 2015
The University of Minnesota Board of Regents has named Expeditions PI and William Norris Professor, Vipin Kumar, a Regent Professor. The designation is the highest level of recognition given to faculty by the University. More details can be found here.
May 7, 2015
Expeditions PI and William Norris Professor, Vipin Kumar, was awarded the 2015 "Outstanding Faculty Award" from the Council of Graduate Students as well as the "Outstanding Mentor Award" from the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. Prof. Kumar was the only faculty to win both of these university-wide awards given to faculty who show unmatched dedication to their students' professional and personal success.
The Fourth Annual Workshop on Understanding Climate Change from Data took place June 30th-July 2nd, at NCAR in Boulder, CO. The workshop featured several speakers, a panel comprised of leading experts in the field, and a poster session. Keynote speakers were NCAR director James Hurrell, National Medal of Science recpient Warren Washington, and NCAR Distinguished Acievement Award recipient Kevin Trenberth.
May 27, 2014
James Faghmous' thesis, "Climate change and variability: A spatio-temporal data mining perspective," won the 2014 University of Minnesota's Best Dissertation Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering. The thesis was further nominated for the Council of Graduate School's Outstanding Dissertation Award and the winner will be announced in December 2014.
December 2013
Muhammed Uluyol received an honorable mention for the Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. In 2013, Muhammed was an undergraduate research assistant in Expeditions PI Vipin Kumar's group working on novel data mining algorithms to monitor ocean phenomena. Despite being a first year student, Muhammed was a co-author in two top-tier computer science conferences: AAAI-13 and ICDM-13. Muhammed was mentored by Dr. James Faghmous, a CSE postdoctoral researcher on the Expeditions project. The CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.
August 15-16, 2013
The Third Annual Workshop on Understanding Climate Change from Data took place August 15th-16th, 2013, at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. The workshop featured several speakers, a panel comprised of leading experts in the field, and a poster session.
April 30, 2013
Graduate student Ph.D. James H. Faghmous successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Climate change and variability: A spatio-temporal data mining approach". James' doctoral research focused on developing novel spatio-temporal data mining techniques to address the unique challenges associated with mining large climate datasets. In addition to the Expeditions in Computing grant, James' doctoral research was funded by an NIH-Neuro-Physical-Computational Graduate Fellowship, an NSF graduate research fellowship, an NSF Nordic Research Opportunity Fellowship, the Norwegian National Research Council, and a University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
November 8, 2012
James Faghmous, Varun Mithal and Luke Styles won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding (CIDU 2012) for their paper "EddyScan: A Physically Consistent Global Ocean Eddy Monitoring Application". In their work, Faghmous and colleagues were able to track ocean eddies (the oceanic analog of hurricanes in the atmosphere) on a global scale much more efficiently and accurately than existing methods. Monitoring global ocean eddy activity is crucial to understanding how salt, heat and nutrients are transported across the ocean as well as future marine biodiversity. James, Varun and Luke are advised by Prof. Vipin Kumar and all work on an NSF Expeditions in Computing project on Understanding Climate Change.
October 6, 2012
Jaya Kawale won the Best Graduate Student Research Award in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 2012 Grace Hopper Conference. The award carries a medal presented at the conference and a cash prize of $500. By winning the award, Jaya has also advanced to the Grand Finals of the 2013 ACM Student Research Competition. Jaya is advised by Prof. Vipin Kumar and works on an NSF Expeditions in Computing project on Understanding Climate Change.
August 6-7, 2012
The Second Annual Workshop on Understanding Climate Change from Data took place August 6th-7th, 2012, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. The workshop featured several speakers, a panel comprised of leading experts in the field, and a poster session.
August 12, 2012
Vipin Kumar received the 2012 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award for technical excellenct and contributions that have had a lasting impact on the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The award was presented during the opening plenary session of the 2012 ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Beijing, China.
February 25, 2012
PhD student Jaya Kawale won the Best Graduate Student Poster Award at the Midwest Women in Computing Celebration for her work on "A Graph Based Approach to Find Teleconnections in Climate Data." As a winner of this regional prize, Jaya will receive funding to attend the national 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration.
December 18, 2011
A paper on precipitation extremes funded by the NSF Expeditions will appear in the February 2012 issue of Nature Climate Change. Read More...
October 31, 2011
The Expeditions project was highlighted as having "huge potential" for influencing climate science methods by Reinhard Budich of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in a recent interview with HPCWire.
October 19, 2011
PhD student Jaya Kawale won the Best Student Paper award for her paper titled "Data Guided Discovery of Dynamic Climate Dipoles" at the NASA Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding (CIDU 2011). The paper was a joint work with authors from the University of Minnesota, North Carolina State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The paper shows the utility of a graph-based approach to find teleconnections in climate data and uses the method as an alternate way for analyzing the performance of the various climate models used to study the global climate system.
September 27, 2011
The Expeditions project was highlighted in a guest posting, "Data Mining for Global Change: Furthering Science, Knowledge", by Karsten Steinhaeuser on The Computing Community Consortium Blog.
September 7, 2011
PhD student Jaya Kawale is featured in The Minnesota Daily.
August 18, 2011
PhD student Jaya Kawale won the 2011 Explorations in Science through Computation Student Award for her work on Discovering Teleconnections in Climate Data through Data Mining. The award will be presented at the 2011 Supercomputing Conference (SC11) awards ceremony.
August 15-16, 2011
The First Annual Workshop on Understanding Climate Change from Data took place August 15th-16th, 2011, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. The workshop featured several speakers, two panel discussions comprised of leading experts in the field, and a poster session.
November 29 - December 10, 2010
Vipin Kumar, Shyam Boriah, and a team of students attended the 16th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico. The team unveiled the beta version of its Tropical Forest ALERTS 1.0 platform on monitoring global land change that is being developed in collaboration with the Planetary Skin Institute and NASA.
September 3, 2010
Vipin Kumar was interviewed on the September 3, 2010 episode of Almanac on Twin Cities Public Television.