NYU Center for Data Science

The CDS Alumni Council recently hosted a happy hour at The Malt House, where alumni gathered for drinks and hors d’oeuvres to socialize.

Great turnout!

How do AI models overcome the “curse of dimensionality”?

CDS PhD alum Zahra Kadkhodaie, CDS-affiliated NYU Silver Professor @eerosim.bsky.social, and Stéphane Mallat show that models can learn to group images semantically simply by cleaning noisy photos.

nyudatascience.medium.com/pre-recognit...

@nyucourant.bsky.social Asst. Prof. & Faculty Fellow @stephmilani.bsky.social gave a CILVR Seminar on building human-centered AI agents, showing how human-centered RL offers a promising framework for addressing challenges in interpretability, specifying objectives, and learning from human feedback.

The new CDS #Research Feature just dropped 📮 Jaume Vives-i-Bastida explores the “pure income effect” among doctors paid not to work in private practice, Jinran Jin and Mengye Ren reveal that AI models are biased towards their own reasoning, and more: t.e2ma.net/webview/9d66...

CDS MS students joined Bertelsmann on Tuesday for an info session.

Representatives discussed the 18-month Data Science Track of the Future Leaders Graduate Program, which features a salary range of $80,000 to $90,000.

Learn more at www.futureleaders-data.com.

CDS hosted a hackathon with NVIDIA, Dell, and AI4Purpose on Feb 18–19.

CDS graduate students built computer vision apps using the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip.

Dell's Logan Lawler provided technical mentorship for the 40 competing teams.

Omni Care AI won 1st prize.

Generalist AIs ace medical exams but fail at hospital operations.

But a small, specialized model created by @lavenderjiang99.bsky.social, @angie-chen.bsky.social, @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social, Eric Oermann, et al beat massive generalists in clinical settings.

nyudatascience.medium.com/generalist-a...

CDS' recent TaD Seminar featured @fredashi.bsky.social (U. of Waterloo) on symbol grounding in language models.

Her work found grounding concentrates in middle layers via an aggregate attention mechanism — replicating across transformers and state-space models, but not unidirectional LSTMs.

CDS is hosting its Spring 2026 Graduate Career Fair on Monday, March 30, 11am–3pm at 60 Fifth Avenue.

Connect with our data science grad students and recent alumni seeking internships and full-time roles.

Free to attend; employers register by March 11: forms.gle/gWGbucuP29GR...

🌸The Women in Data Science (WiDS) group hosted a Galentine's gathering at the CDS Open Space.💐

Students created DIY craft flower bouquets and enjoyed light snacks.

CDS MS and undergraduate students recently gathered for the annual research project fair to discuss projects like driver gaze prediction and carbon benchmarking.

Researchers from across the university met with students to facilitate new collaborations for the current and upcoming semesters.

Opinion | The Bots Are Plotting a Revolution, and It’s All Very Cringe

CDS-affiliated Assoc. Prof. @leifw.bsky.social wrote for The New York Times about Moltbook, the AI-only social network.

He argued that the AI social network is a form of storytelling reflecting human culture, noting that 90% of posts get no response.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/o...

AIs are chatting with each other in the weirdest corner of the internet. Or are they? A new social network has gone viral – and humans aren’t meant to use it. Moltbook is populated by AI agents talking to one another about work, philosophy and the meaning of existence. The experiment h...

CDS Asst. Prof. of CS and Data Science Mengye Ren (@mengyer.bsky.social) spoke with The Independent about Moltbook, a social network for AI agents.

Ren said the bots primarily repeat language model data rather than demonstrating genuine communication.

www.the-independent.com/tech/moltboo...

How LLMs’ validation loss fails to predict performance The dominant strategy for improving AI has been simple: more compute, more data, and more parameters. CDS PhD student Michael Hu says this…

The validation loss of an LLM is too simple to measure progress, and is misleading as a predictor of performance.

CDS' @michahu.bsky.social & @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social, + Courant's Nicholas Lourie, reveal why traditional scaling laws are often unreliable.

nyudatascience.medium.com/how-llms-val...

PropMolFlow: property-guided molecule generation with geometry-complete flow matching - Nature Computational Science PropMolFlow is a flow-matching method for property-guided molecule generation that matches diffusion model performance while generating stable, valid structures more quickly and enabling the discovery...

CDS-affiliated Assistant Professor of Physics @stemartiniani.bsky.social and a research team developed PropMolFlow, an AI model that designs molecules 10x faster than previous methods to speed up the creation of new pharmaceuticals and materials.

Read more: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

CDS PhD students visited the Bryant Park Winter Village recently for a group skating session.

The students hit the ice before heading to the Lodge for hot cocoa to escape the February chill.

Slides from the talk: drive.google.com/file/d/1nGHF...

CDS Prof @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social gave a keynote at the most recent NeurIPS.

He discussed the "Learning to X" paradigm, where one learns algorithms rather than designing them manually, and how he found ways through his research confusion through collaborations at CDS.

neurips.cc/virtual/2025...

TODAY is the last day to submit applications for the CDS MS program for Fall 2026! cds.nyu.edu/masters-admi...

At a fireside chat hosted by SBVA and the Global AI Frontier Lab, CDS founding director @yann-lecun.bsky.social discussed AI research, open-source platforms, and why “AGI” is a misleading goal — pointing instead to “world models” as a path forward.

A quick (and friendly 😊) reminder to our applicants of key required materials:

- Transcripts
- Statement of Academic Purpose
- Résumé/CV
- Three letters of recommendation

Questions? Contact cds-admissions@nyu.edu.

Master’s in Data Science: Admissions Requirements Review the master's in data science requirements at NYU. Learn about deadlines, necessary documents, and prerequisites to apply for our competitive program.

Here are some helpful links:

🔗To view our admissions requirements: cds.nyu.edu/masters-admi...
🔗To start/continue your application: apply.gsas.nyu.edu/apply/

Since the application due date for the CDS MS program falls on a holiday weekend – this Saturday, February 14 – applications will remain open until Tuesday, February 17, 5:00pm EST‼️

CDS recently hosted U. of Waterloo PhD student @argymouz.bsky.social for a MIC Seminar.

Argyris shared research on optimal differentially private sampling of unbounded Gaussians.

This work was originally presented at COLT 2025 and developed with @viverson03.bsky.social and @gautamkamath.com.

LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics Learning manipulable representations of the world and its dynamics is central to AI. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a promising blueprint, but lack of practical guidance and th...

A new paper from CDS' @yann-lecun.bsky.social and Brown's Randall Balestriero introduces LeJEPA, a simpler way to train AI systems without labels.

The method drops many common training tricks, scales efficiently, and still performs well on benchmarks like ImageNet.

arxiv.org/abs/2511.08544

Jonny Sabbath, founder of Living Brands, visited CDS to discuss building bespoke AI tools for culture-forward brands.

He shared how he scales taste across emerging channels using data science for clients like Moet Hennessy.

The event also highlighted a Spring internship.

Alumni Spotlight: CDS Bachelor’s graduate (’23) Carla Garcia Medina is a Software Engineer at Google in Zurich.

She uses the research skills she developed in RL and NLP at CDS to work on LLMs for Search Ads.

A quick (and friendly 😊) reminder to our applicants of key required materials:

- Transcripts
- Statement of Academic Purpose
- Résumé/CV
- Three letters of recommendation

Questions? Contact cds-admissions@nyu.edu.

Master’s in Data Science: Admissions Requirements Review the master's in data science requirements at NYU. Learn about deadlines, necessary documents, and prerequisites to apply for our competitive program.

Here are some helpful links 🔗

To view our admissions requirements: cds.nyu.edu/masters-admi...
To start/continue your application: apply.gsas.nyu.edu/apply/

Since the application due date for the CDS MS program falls on a holiday weekend – this Saturday, February 14 – applications will remain open until Tuesday, February 17, 5:00pm EST‼️