News

Mona Singh is tailoring tools to crack the cancer code
Dec. 15, 2021
Author
Written by Jeff Labrecque
When Mona Singh was in high school, she spent two summers conducting research in an immunology lab at the nearby University of Alabama at Birmingham. Singh was an excellent student, and her family hoped she would follow in her father’s footsteps and become a medical doctor. She was interested in the questions of biology and medicine that the lab pursued, but her heart wasn’t in it. Deep down, she wanted to become a math professor — not a doctor. “To be honest, I don’t know if I understood what being a math professor really meant,” she said. “I just knew I liked math.”
Faculty Profile: Amit Singer creates algorithms and reconstructs 3D images of molecules
Nov. 29, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

Singer’s research is divided into two main components: one - developing algorithms and advanced computational methods to analyze data, and two – using these tools to determine the three-dimensional structures of molecules. “The first component is more theoretical and foundational. I develop algorithms and do mathematical analysis of existing and new algorithms to analyze data. This data can be quite complex with very high dimensionality. This is data with a large amount of noise or the data set can be quite large. So, my lab members and I come up with solutions or tools to process and analyze this data. Such contextualization programing is one part of my research,” he said.

SML 201 reaches peak enrollment with Daisy Yan Huang and Ricardo Masini as co-lecturers
Nov. 24, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

With a return to campus this fall, the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning’s flagship undergraduate course, SML 201: Introduction to Data Science, opened its enrollment to more than 150 students, the highest in its history and…

DataX is funding new AI research projects at Princeton, across disciplines
Nov. 19, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo
Ten interdisciplinary research projects have won funding from Princeton University’s Schmidt DataX Fund, with the goal of spreading and deepening the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning across campus to accelerate discovery. The 10 faculty projects, supported through a major gift from the Schmidt Futures Foundation, involve 19 researchers and several departments and programs, from computer science to politics. The projects explore a variety of subjects, including an analysis of how money and politics interact, discovering and developing new materials exhibiting quantum properties, and advancing natural language processing.
Special Python workshop teaches scientists to make software for wider research community
Nov. 10, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

Many researchers at Princeton University and elsewhere develop their own software programs to help them elucidate complex processes and solve interesting problems, from biomedicine to water management. But when it comes to making the code available to the wider research community, these prototype programs need to make a…

Students take a plunge into a special theoretical deep learning workshop with instructors from academia and big tech companies
Oct. 29, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

As machine learning gains traction in research and industry, one subfield, deep learning, has emerged as a hot area of interest due to rapid development and research, according to Boris Hanin, an assistant professor in Princeton University’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering.

Scientists pinpoint the genes for tuskless African elephants, which have evolved under intense poaching pressure
Oct. 21, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

In certain regions of Africa wracked by heavy poaching, people have observed an increased incidence of African elephants without their iconic white tusks, which are prized in the multibillion-dollar wildlife black market. But there has been no direct genetic evidence indicating how this was happening or why this trait…

CSML Internship Program Provides Students Valuable Research Opportunities
Oct. 13, 2021
Author
Written by Sharon Adarlo

Within a specially-made box in a lab on the campus of Princeton University, several fuzzy bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) flew through the air while a camera sat over the enclosure, watching and recording every moment. What made these bees distinct, besides their artificially constructed habitat, was that these insects…

Michael Hu: studying the connections between machine learning and communications
Sept. 29, 2021
In both his independent work and his development as a software engineer, the CSML certificate has been particularly helpful, said Michael Hu. It not only enabled him to connect to a community of like-minded scholars, but it also gave him opportunities to explore machine learning more deeply.
CSML, PICSciE and DataX help researchers launch new cancer analysis software
Sept. 22, 2021

To probe the origin and spread of cancers in the human body more effectively, Ben Raphael, professor of computer science at Princeton University, and his research lab created HATCHet or Holistic Allele-specific Tumor Copy-number Heterogeneity, an algorithm that is capable of…