Friday, March 23
3pm
Center for Social Complexity
The CSS seminar speaker for Friday, March 23 will be Ryan Zelnio, Ph.D., Chief Analytics Officer, Office of Naval Research. Dr. Zelnio’s talk entitled “The Creation of the Office of Naval Research’s Data & Analytics Lab” (abstract below) is scheduled to begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.
Abstract: The Office of Naval Research (ONR) coordinates, executes, and promotes the science and technology programs of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. It administers the Naval Research Enterprise (NRE) investment portfolio of $2B annually in Naval relevant science and technologies (S&T) ranging from basic research to technology prototyping. This portfolio covers over 3000 grant and contract awards annually over a large variety of technologies. In FY2017 alone, the basic and applied research portfolio (which is less than 50% of its budget) funded 4,411 scientific articles, 2,732 conference papers, 343 theses, 204 books & book chapters and 88 patents. However, while this portfolio is large, it is a drop in the bucket within the global research & development (R&D) enterprise. In an attempt to understand this vast amount of data being produced both within the NRE and globally, ONR recently stood up the Data & Analytics Lab. Its mission is to support strategic decision making at the Office of Naval Research with in-depth analysis of the NRE portfolio to enhance mission effectiveness for U.S. Naval Forces. This new lab is led by Mr. Matt Poe and includes Dr. Ryan Zelnio (2013 GMU SPP grad) serving as the Chief Analytics Officer and LCDR Nick Benes serving as the Chief Data Officer. This lab seeks to harness ONR’s investments in social network analysis, machine learning, natural language processing, data visualization, supervised and unsupervised clustering, and many other data science tools to support decision processes across the NRE. Their talk will cover the range of challenges facing their lab as they stand up their effort and discuss the broader move within the federal government to better apply the tools of data science to understand the complexity of the R&D enterprise. They will also discuss future partnering and internship opportunities.
For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit our calendar.