Frontiers in Computing and Data Science, a two-day conference recently hosted by the MSU Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, drew 115 individuals from universities, national labs and industries across the country.
Held on MSU’s campus, attendees at the conference included academic and industry leaders from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Brown University, IBM, Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Energy and others, as well as a number of graduate students and postdocs.
“Computation is one of the fastest growing fields of science,” said Jean-Luc Cambier, AFOSR program officer. “It’s very important to have this kind of synergy between the various computational disciplines.”
MSU foundation professor and CMSE chair Andrew Christlieb said CMSE is at the nexus of a major revolution in the physical, biological and engineering sciences.
“The faculty in CMSE are developing cutting-edge methods in both computational modeling and data science, and new methods in data driven discover that combine key ideas from both,” Christlieb said. “These ideas will change how science is done here at MSU, as well as around the world.”
Postdoc Brian Danielak, who has joined MSU’s CMSE department to help design the introductory computational modeling course, said the department gives him an opportunity to be at the forefront of what is happening in modeling.
“This conference gives me an idea of what it’s like when professionals in this field talk to each other, so that I can see how we can bring those things into the classroom for people who are doing this for the first time, and show them why this is exciting, and what’s possible,” Danielak said.