VICKSBURG, Miss. – More than 200 people recently attended the inaugural U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Data Science Workshop that was hosted virtually Aug. 25-26 by ERDC’s Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) Research and Development Area. The event was a collaborative effort among multiple laboratories and encouraged participants to rethink the ways they manage and perceive data.
Dr. Jill Crisman, technical director for artificial intelligence for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Research and Engineering, served as keynote speaker.
“This is an area that is fundamental to everything we do, from data collection to numerical modeling, and represents a tremendous amount of opportunity within the DoD,” said ERDC Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Director Dr. David Horner. “Data science is not just important to ITL – it’s important to the ERDC as a whole. This workshop allowed representatives from all areas of our organization to discuss data at the enterprise level rather than the laboratory level or the branch level.”
Other speakers included Professor David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Professor Charbel Farhat, chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University; and Dr. Narayan Srinivasa, director of Machine Intelligence Systems at Intel. The workshop also featured a panel discussion that brought together data experts from across ERDC, as well as 49 poster presentations.
“This event enabled us to talk about plans for the road ahead and examine ways to take advantage of our existing tools and efforts,” said Horner. “Focus areas include artificial intelligence and machine learning, managing large volumes of data, autonomous vehicle research, performance and maintenance of aging infrastructure and more.”