NYU Center for Data Science

Moshe Bellows, Capstone Mentor

Capstone proposal deadline now extended to August 17, 2025!

Partner with our exceptional master's students to tackle real-world data challenges using advanced ML, AI, and analytics.

More info: cds.nyu.edu/masters-in-d...

Submit:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Get through the dog days of summer by enjoying some data science research 🔬 Cristina Savin's stance that AI needs "Kindergarten," Tal Linzen, Sam Bowman, and Julian Michael on ChatGPT "breaking NLP," and more on August’s research feature! 📨 mailchi.mp/nyu/the-cds-...

CDS MS student Kerr Tan is a returning Data Science Intern at PepsiCo, developing a multi-agent AI chatbot in their vibrant SoHo office.

Fun fact: her manager, James Zhan, is an NYU MSDS alum!

Kerr is also serving as a TA for DS-UA 301: Introduction to LLMs.

Large Language Models Are Too Smart to Model Human Minds, So Researchers Built Smaller Ones AI trained on child-scale data challenges Chomsky’s claim that grammar learning requires innate knowledge.

CDS' @tallinzen.bsky.social and @michahu.bsky.social et al show that "baby" LMs trained on human‑scale data (~100M words) provide more useful analogs to human language acquisition than full-size LLMs like Llama 3, which are trained on trillions of words.

nyudatascience.medium.com/large-langua...

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1j3A8...

NUS120 Distinguished Speaker Series | Professor Yann LeCun YouTube video by NUScast

WATCH: CDS Prof. @yann-lecun.bsky.social warns that LLMs lack memory, planning, and grounded world models. He argued for JEPA + energy-based models as a better path toward Advanced Machine Intelligence.

“If you're interested in human-level AI, don’t work on LLMs.”

www.youtube.com/live/m3H2q6M...

A free preprint, 102 Python notebooks, 115 videos, and solutions to 200 exercises are available at www.ps4ds.net

From Abstract to Applied: A New Approach to Teaching Data Science Fundamentals Carlos Fernandez-Granda’s new CUP textbook reimagines how probability and statistics are taught — blending the two with real-world…

CDS Assoc. Prof. Carlos Fernandez-Granda has published "Probability and Statistics for Data Science" with Cambridge University Press—pairing probability and statistics side by side, with real-world examples throughout.

nyudatascience.medium.com/from-abstrac...

‪@tiagoventura.bsky.social‬ + CDS-affiliated Jonathan Nagler & @jatucker.bsky.social tested a WhatsApp deactivation during Brazil’s 2022 election—blocking auto-downloads of images & videos reduced misinformation recall by ~0.4σ, but didn't change beliefs or polarization.

www.nyu.edu/about/news-p...

Past collaborators include Capital One, Goldman Sachs, IEEE, Infinitus, J.P. Morgan, Kaggle, Moody’s, New York Life, the New York Yankees, the Philadelphia Phillies, Revelio Labs, and Warner Music Group.

Real-World Impact: How CDS Capstone Projects Drive Innovation for Industry Partners CDS Capstone teams deliver real‑world analytics solutions to partners across sectors — Fall 2025 proposals due August 3.

CDS Capstone data science MS students delivered deployable analytics to S&P Global Ratings, Horizon Media & others.

Fall 2025 project proposals are due August 3.

Learn more: nyudatascience.medium.com/real-world-i...

Building Bridges Across the Pacific: How CDS Launched a New Model for International AI Research… CDS has launched a new research lab in Brooklyn in partnership with Korean institutions, leading cross‑Pacific collaborations in AI.

CDS professors have launched the Global AI Frontier Lab in Brooklyn with Korean partners like KAIST.

Profs @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social and @yann-lecun.bsky.social lead work on fundamental AI, responsible AI, and healthcare, and a biweekly seminar series.

nyudatascience.medium.com/building-bri...

Meet the Fellow: Mateo Dulce Rubio CDS Faculty Fellow Mateo Dulce Rubio develops statistical methods for humanitarian policy, including a UN-backed AI system for landmine…

A warm welcome to incoming CDS Faculty Fellow Mateo Dulce Rubio, who develops statistical methods for humanitarian and policy applications.

His work estimating landmine risk has been deployed in Colombia & Afghanistan, with plans to scale globally.

nyudatascience.medium.com/meet-the-fel...

YouTube video by Flatiron Institute Yann LeCun: Models of SSL (April 29, 2025)

CDS' @yann-lecun.bsky.social called for a new paradigm in AI at @simonsfoundation.org: use energy-based models + joint embedding to learn how the world works.

“We’re not going to get to human-level AI by just training on text.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfqW...

simonsfoundation.org/event/self-s...

Full slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1Tfif...

CDS MS Admissions Ambassadors led a housing info session for incoming students.

Key takeaways:
💡Fall on-campus housing already closed
💡Subway fares cap at $34/week after 12 rides
💡Guarantors need 80-100x monthly rent income
💡Broker fees now only apply when using brokers

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

The article also features CDS Associate Professor Sam Bowman (@sleepinyourhat.bsky.social — currently on leave) and former CDS Research Scientist Julian Michael.

The Quanta piece: www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

Three CDS Researchers Featured in Major Story on LLMs’ Impact on NLP Three CDS researchers are featured in a major new oral history from Quanta Magazine on how LLMs transformed NLP.

Three CDS researchers, including @tallinzen, are featured in @QuantaMagazine’s new oral history on how LLMs upended NLP.

In our blog post, Tal talks about the conditions that made CDS particularly well-positioned to leverage this revolution.

nyudatascience.medium.com/three-cds-re...

☀️CDS Summer Spotlight: CDS undergraduate student Kelly Lee is spending her summer as a Cybersecurity Intern at Deloitte, implementing Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) systems and helping clients streamline their Risk Control Self-Assessment processes.

CDS Faculty Fellow @timrudner.bsky.social served as general chair for the 7th Symposium on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference, held April alongside ICLR 2025.

The symposium explored connections between probabilistic machine learning and AI safety, NLP, RL, and AI for science.

Yubei Chen, Co-Founder of Aizip Inc – Interview Series Yubei Chen is co-founder of Aizip inc., a company that builds the world's smallest and most efficient AI models. He is also an assistant professor in the ECE Department at University of California, Da...

Former CDS postdoc Yubei Chen, now Co‑Founder of Aizip, applies ideas from neuroscience & self‑supervised learning to tiny, efficient AI models for edge devices—no cloud needed.

“High efficiency, low power, minimal latency.”

Read more: www.unite.ai/yubei-chen-c...

Meet the Fellow: Elena Sirotkina Elena Sirotkina joins CDS as Faculty Fellow and Asst Prof researching political behavior through computer vision and behavioral latency.

Elena Sirotkina will join CDS as a Faculty Fellow this fall. Sirotkina’s research develops computational methods in political science, using computer vision and behavioral latency to better understand political behavior at scale.

nyudatascience.medium.com/meet-the-fel...

CDS Summer Spotlight: CDS MS student Mihir Upadhyay is spending his summer as a research intern at the RC Trust at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, working with Prof Bilal Zafar on evaluating diversity in LLM responses and detecting it via model parameter indicators.

Center For Data Science Undergraduate Research Program (CURP) Discover CURP, a data science summer program at NYU, offering undergraduates hands-on research experience with expert faculty to advance their skills.

More about the program: cds.nyu.edu/research-pro...

Meet our Data Science Research Program for Undergraduate Students scholars! 🎉

Qingling Bao (NYU)
Riley Stacy (Barnard)
Will Wu (NYU Stern)
Allen Guo (NYU)
Aurora Shahu (Manhattan College)

Starting in the fall, these undergrads will be doing research with CDS faculty.

Center For Data Science Undergraduate Research Program (CURP) Discover CURP, a data science summer program at NYU, offering undergraduates hands-on research experience with expert faculty to advance their skills.

More about the program: cds.nyu.edu/research-pro...

Meet our Data Science Research Program for Undergraduate Students scholars! 🎉

Qingling Bao (NYU)
Riley Stacy (Barnard)
Will Wu (NYU Stern)
Allen Guo (NYU)
Aurora Shahu (Manhattan College)

These undergrads are spending the summer doing research with CDS faculty.

CDS Summer Spotlight: CDS undergraduate student Hanwen Zhang is interning at SAS as a solution advisor analytical intern.

She's analyzing real-time transit system data and working on predictive maintenance projects for dining facility sensors.

Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neur...

CDS Prof. @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social's 2014 "attention" paper was recently the Runner-Up for the ICLR 2025 Test of Time Award.

The paper introduced dynamic attention in machine translation, laying the groundwork for transformers and LLMs.

arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473

AI Agents Learn to Test Their Own Hypotheses About How the World Works AI agents that test their own hypotheses can adapt to new environments with fewer trials.

CDS PhD student Anthony GX-Chen (@agx-chen.bsky.social‬), CDS-associated Prof. Rob Fergus, and Kenneth Marino (@kennethmarino.bsky.social‬) have built AI agents that test hypotheses about their environment, enabling knowledge transfer to new situations.

nyudatascience.medium.com/ai-agents-le...