Kristin Bennett

Biography

Kristin P. Bennett is the Associate Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Application and a Professor in the Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science Departments and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on extracting information from data using novel predictive or descriptive mathematical models and data visualizations, and the applications of these methods to support decision making and to accelerate discovery in science, engineering, public health and business. She has 25 years of experience and over 100 publications in these areas.  As an active member of the machine learning, data mining, and operations research communities, she has served as present or past associate or guest editor for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Naval Research Logistics, Machine Learning Journal, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and Journal on Machine Learning Research. She served as program chair of the Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She founded and directs the NIH sponsored “TB-Insight” project which provided molecular epidemiology tools and methods to help track and control tuberculosis. She also founded and directs the “Data Analytics Throughout Undergraduate Mathematics” or DATUM which is pioneering highly effective new approaches for data analytics undergraduate education.  She also founded the Data Interdisciplinary Challenges Intelligent Technology Exploration Laboratory (Data INCITE Lab.)   In the Data INCITE Lab, undergraduate and graduate students tackle open applied data analytics problems contributed by industry, foundations, and researchers.

Research Interest

Machine Learning, Data Mining, Data Science, Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics, Combining operations research