The UMBC Data Science Scholars, are funded by the NSF grant (Award# 1915714 Undergraduate Data Science Education at Scale partnership between UC Berkeley, UMBC, and Mills College). The students on this project work on thematic areas from related NSF projects including the NSF iHARP project and NSF information augmentation project.
These students serve as peer mentors to foundational data science students and are also part of a student cohort at the Center for Women in Technology as CWIT Affiliates and the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3).
Click here to learn more about all of our scholars.
Program led by: Dr. Vandana Janeja (Information Systems Department and MData lab)
Center Partnerships: Dr. Carolyn Seaman, Director CWIT; Dr. Christine Mallinson, Director CS3, Dr. Felipe Filomeno, Associate Director CS3
Mentoring partners: Dr. Karen Chen (IS), Dr. Dillon Mahmoudi (GES), Dr. Brian Soller (SAPH), Dr. Christine Mallinson (LLC), Lavon Davis (LLC), graduate student mentor
Nehal Naqvi is a political science and statistics student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he is a Sondheim and Blaustein Public Affairs Scholar, a member of the Honors College, and a Data Science Scholar within UMBC’s Center for Social Scholarship. His academic focus areas include Research Methods, Public Policy, and Applied Statistics.
As a part of CS3, Nehal is assisting with the EAGER project on deepfake detection through survey design/administration and data analysis using statistical methods.
Chloe is a rising senior at Georgetown University. Originally from Houston, Texas, Chloe is studying linguistics with a minor in Chinese. For the summer of 2023, she joined the UMBC Data Science Scholars as an undergraduate researcher on the linguistics side with Dr. Christine Mallinson and PhD student Lavon Davis. She listens to recordings of both fake and authentic audio to identify linguistic cues that distinguish deepfakes from real speech.
She is now developing a training program based on those cues that were identified with the aim of teaching people what to listen for when they encounter potentially fake audio online. She assists with evaluating the efficacy of this training program and further refining it, literature reviews, and provides support to the rest of the team in writing about the project for publication in academic journals.
