The overarching goal of his research is to improve predictive data science and scientific computing via intelligent computation.

From navigating with map apps and streaming new music to virtual personal assistants like Alexa and Siri, machine learning is a valuable tool that has become an intrinsic part of our daily lives. Yet these systems are not always reliable because they sometimes provide inaccurate information.

Haizhao Yang, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics, is paving the way for more dependable machine learning systems by advancing its subset of deep learning. Deep learning is a method that uses three or more layers of neural networks to learn information and has led to tremendous breakthroughs in the field by providing more interpretable and precise outcomes.

The overarching goal of his research is to improve predictive data science and scientific computing via intelligent computation, which could have significant impacts on several fields, like weather prediction and health care.

Because deep learning is still in its infancy, establishing mathematical and statistical principles is an important step in improving its ability to obtain reliable results in these applications, Yang explained.

However, there are several challenges that he must overcome to make deep learning more reliable. The first obstacle is gaining a better understanding of how physical processes, like weather phenomena for example, can be applied to his research.

The second challenge involves lowering the expensive computational costs associated with the creation of deep learning. In order to overcome these challenges, Yang will utilize artificial intelligence to examine historical data and develop numerical strategies to make fast computations.

Yang, who recently started a new affiliate appointment at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is looking forward to collaborating with fellow faculty members—especially those in the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning—and utilizing the institute’s state-of-the-art computing infrastructure.

“The unique, interactive environment and powerful resources provided by UMIACS will accelerate my research on advancing intelligent computation,” he explained.

Yang has received several prestigious awards, including the award for Maryland Research Excellence in 2023, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2022, the Teaching for Tomorrow Award at Purdue University in 2021 and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020.

Before coming to UMD, Yang was an assistant professor of mathematics at Purdue University. He also held an affiliate position at the Institute of Data Science at the National University of Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 2015.

Adapted from an article written by Ethan Cannistra, UMIACS communications group

As chair, Levy launched the Brin Mathematics Research Center, expanded undergraduate and graduate program offerings, and hired 22 new faculty members.

Professor Doron Levy has been reappointed chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics for a five-year term, effective July 1, 2023. He has been chair for the last four years.

“Doron has extended the Department of Mathematics’ reach and enhanced its already strong academic and research programs,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “I know the department will continue to flourish with him at the helm, and I look forward to our continued work together.”

Levy, who joined UMD in 2007, will continue to lead the department, which has over 100 tenured/tenure-track and professional-track faculty members, over 600 undergraduate majors and 200 graduate students, and teaches over 10,000 students a semester.

“I am looking forward to continue working with all members of the Math Department and the University of Maryland to further improve the department’s research program and strengthen our undergraduate and graduate programs,” Levy said. “I am fully committed to improving student success and strengthening our efforts to build an inclusive department where everyone can thrive. I would like to thank Dean Varshney and Provost Rice for their ongoing support of the Department of Mathematics.” 

The department saw unprecedented levels of energy and enthusiasm over the past four years with Levy as chair. A major accomplishment was establishing the Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC), which will host 18 workshops, four summer schools and eight distinguished speakers during its first two years. Levy serves as the founding director of the center, which brings over 300 mathematicians from around the world to UMD each year.

A wave of faculty retirements provided opportunities for Levy to recruit top talent to the department. He hired 16 tenured/tenure-track faculty members (including three who hold endowed chairs), two long-term visiting professors and four lecturers. The new faculty members conduct research in many different areas, including number theory, algebraic geometry, geometric analysis, low dimensional topology, symplectic topology, dynamical systems, probability, analysis, logic, partial differential equations, mathematical biology, statistics, numerical analysis and data sciences.

As chair, Levy secured the department’s role in leading the new data science minor, a joint initiative with the Department of Computer Science. He oversaw the creation of new courses and the revision of STAT 100 and STAT 400 to include modern content and technology. Levy expanded the department’s role in the CMNS Science Academy, which offers professional master’s degree programs in data science, machine learning, bioinformatics and computational biology, and quantum computing. The department also sponsors the EDGE Program, which is designed to strengthen the ability of women and minority students to successfully complete graduate programs in the mathematical sciences. 

To expand outreach to high school students, Levy co-led a joint project between the Department of Mathematics and the College of Education to offer calculus courses to students in Prince George’s County high schools that don’t offer the courses. Levy and Larry Washington, the department’s associate chair for undergraduate studies, also created the Maryland High School Credit by Exam program, which offers final exams in advanced topics to students at eight local high schools. Students who perform well on the exam and then enroll at UMD can move on to more advanced courses.

Levy boosted the department’s fundraising efforts, securing over $12 million in gifts including the largest single gift in department history: an estate gift from Carol Fullerton, daughter of the late Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Hauptman (Ph.D. ’55, mathematics), to establish the Herbert A. Hauptman Endowed Graduate Fellowship Program. Additional gifts provided undergraduate scholarships and graduate student awards and travel, as well as $4.75 million from Mathematics Professor Emeritus Michael Brin and his wife Eugenia and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation to launch the Brin Mathematics Research Center.

Levy secured funding to double the size of the department’s postdoctoral program. The department attracts more than 500 applications annually and supports more than 20 postdocs, including 15 Brin and Novikov Postdocs.

“Over the next five years, I will continue to prepare for the expected retirement of faculty members and identify exceptional targets for recruitment,” Levy said. “I will also continue facilitating the rise of the Brin MRC as one of the most prominent mathematics research centers.”

Levy plans to develop summer bridge programs for undergraduate students and graduate students, increase research opportunities for high school and undergraduate students within the department, and lead a comprehensive revision of the department’s honors program. He will also continue to prioritize raising scholarship and fellowship funding to support undergraduate and graduate students.

An active leader in the mathematics community, Levy served on the board of governors for the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications and the board of directors for the Society for Mathematical Biology. Among his many distinctions, Levy was named a 2017-18 fellow in the Big Ten Academic Leadership Program, a Pauli Fellow of the Wolfgang Pauli Institute in Vienna and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2013, he was named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Levy’s research focuses on biomedical applications of mathematics with a particular interest in cancer dynamics, drug resistance, immunology, imaging and cell motility. He is a member of the Maryland Biophysics Graduate Program and the Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computation Graduate Program, and he serves as a co-director of the NCI-UMD Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Tel-Aviv University in 1991, Levy received both his master’s degree and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Tel-Aviv University in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He then held visiting and faculty positions at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University.

Seven workshops and three distinguished lectures are planned for spring, as well as two summer schools

The Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC) entered its second year with two very successful summer schools. First, we held a two-week school on Partial Hyperbolicity following the spring Partial Hyperbolicity workshop. This summer school was organized by Dima Dolgopyat, Federico Rodriguez Hertz (Penn State) and Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago). The second summer school was a one-week school on Fluid Dynamics organized by Huy Nguyen and Hussain Ibdah. Each summer school had close to 40 participants that were chosen from over 100 applicants. 

The fall semester welcomed participants in four workshops. The first Fall workshop was on “Polylogarithms, Cluster Algebras, and Scattering Amplitudes.” This workshop was organized by Christian Zickert, two of his former students Dani Kaufman (now at Copenhagen University) and Zack Greenberg (Heidelberg University), and Hebert Gangl (Durham University/MPIM Bohn). This workshop explored the many exciting recent developments in the field including the proof of Zagier's conjecture (expressing the regulator in terms of classical polylogarithms) in weight 4 by Goncharov and Rudenko (2018) following a depth reduction formula by Gangl (2016), the general depth reduction (to half the weight) by Rudenko (2020, formerly a conjecture of Goncharov), the precise formulation of cluster polylogarithms and depth reduction in weight 6 by Matveiakin and Rudenko (2022), a cluster formulation of the second motivic Chern class by Goncharov and Kislinskyi (2021), and the iterated integral expressions for Grassmannian and Aomoto polylogarithms by Charlton, Gangl and Radchenko (2019).

The second fall workshop on “Low Complexity Dynamical Systems” was organized by Darren Creutz (U.S. Naval Academy), Adam Kanigowski, and Rodrigo Treviño. This workshop focused on the study of two major conjectures that relate forms of low complexity: the S-adic conjecture, which asserts that there is an explicit relationship between (sub)linear word complexity and a substitutive structure, and the Pisot conjecture, which asserts that in the context of substitution systems, discrete spectrum is equivalent, roughly, to a specific form of algebraic substitutive structure (and presumably these are also implied, in some sense, by a word complexity property). 

“Statistical Inference on Networks and High-Dimensional Data” was the topic of the third fall workshop. Organized by Vince Lyzinski, Avanti Athreya (Johns Hopkins), and Minh Tang (NC State University), this workshop was held in honor of Carey Priebe’s 60th birthday. Topics discussed spanned classical statistical inference, such as testing and estimation, and modern machine learning, such as neural networks, information retrieval, and prediction.

The final fall conference on the “Mathematics of Malaria Transmission Dynamics” was organized by Lauren Childs (Virginia Tech), Abba Gumel, and Jemal Mohammed-Awel (Morgan State University). Some of the topics of this workshop included a genomic-epidemiology modeling framework for the population abundance of the malaria vector, formulating and fitting models for malaria spread that incorporate climate change and insecticide resistance, modeling impacts of climate change on the global distribution of malaria mosquitoes and disease burden, optimal deployment of insecticide-based resources (e.g., long-lasting insecticidal nets, indoor residual spraying, etc.), the emergence and evolution of parasite drug resistance and impact on malaria spread, and quantifying the impacts of immunity and parasite diversity on drug resistance evolution.

In addition to the four workshops, we held two distinguished Brin MRC lectures: the first by Wolfgang Dahmen (University of South Carolina/RWTH Aachen) who delivered a talk on “Predictive Science and Deep Learning.” The second talk on “Recent Progress in Spin Glass Theory” was delivered by Sourav Chatterjee (Stanford). 

We planned a very exciting and busy schedule for the upcoming spring semester. We will hold seven workshops, including a March workshop on “Recent Advances in Time Series Analysis” in celebration of the career of Benjamin Kedem. Three visitors will deliver Distinguished Brin MRC Lectures: Jens Marklof (University of Bristol), Svetlana Jitomirskaya (UC Irvine) and Nigel Hitchin (University of Oxford). 

We will also host a young investigators meeting in Dynamics, a mid-Atlantic meeting in mathematical biology, and a meeting of the Mathematics Department Chairs from the Big 10 universities. 

Looking forward, we advertised two summer schools for Summer 2024: a summer school on “Mixing Fluids Across Planetary Scales” organized by our colleagues from the Departments of Astronomy, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, and Geology, and a summer school on “PDE and Randomness.”

I said it before, and I will say it again—we could not have hoped for a better start for the Brin Mathematics Research Center.

Written by: Doron Levy, Director of the Brin Mathematics Research Center