The purpose of the Transdisciplinary Seed Grant Program is to provide funds to foster new transdisciplinary research and scholarship between faculty members from different UCLA departments. The two priorities for the FY17 competition were north campus-led research projects and projects involving big data. The names of our winning faculty members and their projects are below:

Mark Handcock – Reducing Homelessness in LA using Big Data and Predictive Modeling
Erin Hartman – Leveraging Highly Granular Data in Sampling and Analysis of Political Surveys
Rick Schoenberg – Searching for Repeating Foreshocks by Data-mining Massive Continuous Seismic Waveforms

Congratulations to Tianmin Shu, Ph.D. student and member of the VCLA research group, as his research was recently profiled in New Scientist. The work taught a robot, Baxter, the subtleties of interacting with humans. The article can be found at this link.

Tianmin will be presenting his paper “Learning Social Affordance Grammar from Videos: Transferring Human Interactions to Human-Robot Interactions” at IEEE’s ICRA 2017 (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) in Singapore on May 30, 2017.

Congratulations to Mike Tsiang, lecturer, as the paper “Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events”, which he co-authored, has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is a link to the paper and another link to the UCLA Newsroom article that discusses his research.

The Design and Analysis of Experiments 2017 (DAE 2017) Conference will be held at UCLA on October 12 – 14, 2017. It is being organized by UCLA professors Hongquan Xu, Statistics and Weng Kee Wong, Biostatistics.