Despite the pounding rain outside, more than 25 student teams and dozens of faculty, student, and industry representatives attended the inaugural Columbia-Barnard Undergraduate Computer and Data Science Research Fair on November 11, 2022. With posters and interactive installations that examined everything from detecting political stances in Supreme Court decisions to modeling COVID-19 dynamics and exploring the nature of love in the age of the algorithm, the fair highlighted the unique and often interdisciplinary ways that Columbia and Barnard undergraduates think about using data and computer science to understand the world.

Born of the DSI Center for Data, Media & Society (DMS), whose mission is to support interdisciplinary research, the Fair is a unique offering for Columbia’s undergraduates. For several years, DMS has offered research assistantships for students pursuing interdisciplinary projects; some of these have even grown into independent businesses and federally funded research projects. More significantly, the CS/DS Fair — which was co-hosted by the Barnard Program in Computer Science, the Vagelos Computational Science Center; and the Department of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering — was organized and led by a team of undergraduates, who did everything from shape its thematic direction to recruit and review submissions.

“I have a curiosity about the implications of computer science and data science in the real world,” says Arushi Mittal, a Barnard economics major minoring in mathematics and anthropology, who served as poster session and recruiting co-captain. “I’m really interested in women and leadership diversity in healthcare, and doing this fair allowed me to grow that.”

Susan McGregor and Rebecca Wright

Kaylee Fang, a sophomore in computer science at Columbia College who co-led outreach for the event, adds, “My interests are more geared towards the data science part of it, since I’m interested in computational biology. It was a good opportunity to see which professors and labs were doing this research.”

The diverse interests of the undergraduate organizers were reflected in the broad range of research topics among student contributors. While some projects proposed innovative solutions to well-known problems — such as using “shock content” metrics to identify misinformation, or applying differential privacy principles to create machine learning models that work well even for underrepresented groups — others took on cutting-edge topics that even advanced researchers are just beginning to address.

For example, multiple health-oriented projects developed data science techniques to model the progression of metastatic cancers, how cancer evolves at the cellular level, or to enhance cancer risk prediction. While it may seem obvious to apply machine learning, artificial intelligence and other data science techniques to a field as data-rich as medicine, many of these techniques are only just gaining traction at large research institutes. As the projects presented at this year’s research fair make clear, however, Columbia and Barnard undergraduates are ready to grow into these research and clinical roles.

In addition to showcasing their work and gaining valuable practice presenting their research, poster session and demonstration participants were eligible for prizes within their track, which went to four outstanding projects that used a wide range of data and computer science techniques. Awards were sponsored by industry partner Instabase along with contributions from Columbia’s Department of Statistics and the MS Financial Economics program at the Columbia Business School.

Given the level of interest from students, faculty, and industry, DSI envisions that the CS/DS Fair is here to stay. If helping shape this exciting event is something you or your organization would like to be involved in for Fall 2023, we encourage you to get in touch!