By Ana Ruiz Brictson | Personal editor
Chairman Linda Livingstone announced that Baylor had reached R1 status according to Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education on December 19. To achieve this, the Illuminate strategic plan included hiring Dr. Henry Han as both the McCollum Endowed Chair in Data Science and a Professor of Computer Science.
Han’s work over the past year has involved data science and contributed to the university’s progress to become a renowned research university. His interests include fintech, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and health informatics, cybersecurity and quantum computing.
“I think Baylor is the best because in the days when Baylor was working for R1 status, they paid a lot of attention, they gave a lot of resources to move forward in that direction,” said Han. “I really appreciate it. I think it’s a great opportunity for me to build a bigger data science program and create data science research.
Currently, Han said he is working on several projects within his department. He said he is preparing several seminars and conferences so that the Baylor community can be better informed about the type of research being carried out in data science and to potentially encourage students of any major to join the science community. Datas.
Last semester, Emily Liau, Austin, a sophomore and bioinformatics major, took Han’s data science course and said that for the final project, students had to select a data set and run a full data analysis process from start to finish. the end.
“What I did was develop these machine learning models to try to predict the type of precipitation in a certain geographic region of Texas based on the corresponding temperature observed in that region,” Liau said. “My machine learning model turned out to be quite accurate.”
According to Liau, Han reached out at the end of the semester and asked her if she was willing to continue working on the project to improve it. She is currently testing other machine learning models to test the accuracy of her machine learning model.
“I think being able to apply what I learned in class to a real data set is something I wouldn’t have had the chance to do if I hadn’t been involved in research with Dr. Han,” Liau said.
Han said a big factor in why Baylor received R1 status earlier than expected is that staff and faculty worked hard together to achieve it. The university gave a lot of help to the research staff whenever they asked for it.
“The overall goal is not R1 – it’s a new beginning, not the end,” Provost Nancy Brickhouse said in a previous Lariat interview. “The goal is to solve these great problems facing the world and to do so by rooting firmly in a Christian foundation.”
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