NYU Center for Data Science

CDS PhD students Aramis Tanelus, Varun Yerram (@varunyer), Grégoire Lambrecht, Carmel Pe’er, Jiacheng (Patrick) Shen, Nishka Pant, Niket Patel (@niketnpatel), Ellen Su, Boyi Yang, Sara Dragutinovic (@sara_drag), and Shashwat Singh met to celebrate their first year at CDS.

Courant Faculty Fellow @jocelynqchen, CDS Assoc Prof @gregd_nlp and UT-Austin coauthors (Yutong Xin, @IsilDillig) introduced VeriSoftBench, a benchmark of 500 Lean 4 proof obligations for software verification. GitHub: github.com/utopia-group/V… arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2602.18307

CDS Assoc. Prof. of Music Technology and Data Science Brian McFee discusses his research focus at the intersection of audio signals and large language models. He works on music information retrieval, investigating the representations of audio learned by LLMs and other systems.

CDS Associated Prof. @VasantDhar (Stern School of Business, author, podcast host) moderated the CDS Startup Panel. Panelists Haftan Eckholdt (5x founder), Mike King (@iPullRank), and CDS alumnus Suvir Wadhwa (@suvirwadhwa, Flite) discussed the path to startup success.

Getting the most out of advanced AI optimizers like Muon doesn’t have to rely on guesswork. Courant PhD students @ShikaiQiu and @charllechen, CDS PhD Student @HoangPV1512, CDS Asst. Prof. @Qi_Lei_, and CDS Prof. @andrewgwils bridge theory and practice. nyudatascience.medium.com/building-the-s…

CDS Associate Professor of Mathematics and Data Science Carlos Fernandez-Granda on his research into foundational models. He is excited to explore the “potential and limitations of these models for applications in healthcare, scientific imaging.”

CDS and the @NYUWasserman Center recently hosted an Interview & Technical Prep Workshop for CDS undergrads. The session involved technical problem-solving tips, interview strategies, and insights into what recruiters prioritize during the hiring process.

CDS students gathered at the CDS Open Space for "Interview Prep Jeopardy" organized by the CDS Graduate Student Community-Building Group (GCBG) and Women in Data Science (WiDS). Teams answered questions inspired by real data science interviews to win prizes of CDS merch.

The April CDS #Research Feature has dropped 📧 Yann LeCun (@ylecun) brings us Rectified LpJEPA, Jiajian Ma (@Jiajian_Ma) develops a new deep learning model to lower multiple sclerosis diagnosis error rates, and more on this month’s feature! #datascience t.e2ma.net/webview/hcix1h…

CDS PhD student Anthony GX-Chen (@AntChen_) explains his paper, “KL-Regularized Reinforcement Learning Is Designed to Mode Collapse.” See blog linked below for more.

Why do AI models repeat the same answers? CDS PhD student Anthony GX-Chen (@AntChen_), @bicycleman15, @JeffGuo__, @rob_fergus, & CDS Assoc Prof Rajesh Ranganath, show that diversity loss and mode collapse are built-in features of reinforcement learning. nyudatascience.medium.com/why-are-ai-ans…

CDS Asst. Prof. Yanjun Han (@yanjun_han) and colleagues at NYU and MIT explains why transformers trained on synthetic data excel at empirical Bayes (EB) problems. By using universal priors, these models adapt to new data through posterior contraction. arxiv.org/abs/2602.15136

Project proposals this year by CDS Faculty Fellow Mateo Dulce Rubio, CDS Assoc. Prof. Carlos Fernandez-Grande, Asst. Prof. Grace Lindsay, and Asst. Prof. Mengye Ren (@mengyer)!

Applications for the Data Science Research Program for Undergraduate Students are open! - Work directly with CDS faculty and researchers on cutting-edge projects - In-person - 2026-2027 academic year - 10 hours/week - Funded Deadline: May 1, 2026 cds.nyu.edu/research-progr…

CDS-affiliated Asst Prof @sainingxie, CDS founding director @ylecun, and others released a paper on multimodal pretraining that focuses on moving past the limitations of standard language modeling to create more versatile systems. arxiv.org/abs/2603.03276

CDS Asst. Prof. Grace Lindsay shares research directions she is excited about: - Building foundation models for satellite imagery in climate applications - Using recent compute increases to build embodied models that navigate complex environments by mimicking the brain

CDS-affiliated Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Itai Yanai (@ItaiYanai), & CDS-affiliated Associate Professor of Computer Science Benjamin Peherstorfer (@benjaminpeher). (3/3)

Among the highly cited researchers: CDS-affiliated Professor of Biology Rahul Satija (@satijalab), CDS-affiliated Professor of Politics Joshua Tucker (@j_a_tucker), (2/3)

Clarivate named NYU a top research institution for its concentration of "highly cited researchers," which is defined as being in the top 0.1%. NYU is home to 0.4% of these researchers, putting it among the top 70 research powerhouses worldwide. nyu.edu/about/news-pub… (1/3)

AI is becoming incredibly powerful at solving complex math, but it still requires strict human supervision. CDS Silver Prof Julia Kempe (@KempeLab) tested top models on unpublished math questions, exploring their capabilities and limits in a new paper. nyudatascience.medium.com/testing-the-li…