Meet our Co-Director
Dr. Arya Farahi
Assistant Professor;
Department of Statistics and Data Science
The University of Texas at Austin
Arya Farahi is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science (SDS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he was a Data Science Fellow at the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and received his Ph.D. in physics and scientific computing from the University of Michigan. His research contributes to the fields of astroinformatics and urban informatics and is focused on understanding and mitigating the unexpected and not-well understood consequences of AI models, including algorithmic bias and uncertainty quantification. He was a Schmidt Science Fellow finalist, recipient of the best student paper award in KDD’18, and recipient of over $500k in grant funding.
Dr. Farahi is currently leading three research teams. He is co-director of the Urban Information Lab at UT-Austin, where the team integrates emerging technologies, methods, and data science to analyze urban problems. He co-founded the Data-Informed Cities for Everyone (DICE) community, a multi-institutional research collaboration that uses data to inform budget planning, resource allocation, and policy evaluation in urban settings. He is also part of the leadership team of Baryon Pasters (BP), an international research team that designs and deploys computational and algorithmic solutions to problems in modern survey astronomy. In addition to his scientific pursuits, Dr. Farahi is interested in implementing novel educational models to engage with students. He and his colleagues at the University of Michigan built the first data science “Service learning” program. He is also an active member of the data science for social good community, a growing group of data scientists using AI solutions to improve society by enhancing equitable access to resources. He is involved in several international projects and collaborations, including HETDEX, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the COsmostatistics INitiative (COIN), and the XMM-XXL Consortium, among others. He is also a Statistics Without Borders (SWB) volunteer.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D. Scientific Computing, University of Michigan
- Ph.D. Physics, University of Michigan
