David Jensen

David Jensen is a faculty member in the Maning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) and is currently on leave for the 2023 Spring semester. He directs the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory, which he founded in 2000. Jensen also serves as the director of the Computational Social Science Institute, an interdisciplinary effort at UMass to study social phenomena using computational tools and concepts. From 1991 to 1995, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. Jensen received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992.

His research focuses on machine learning and causal modeling. Jensen is particularly interested in analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems, with the goals of furthering prediction, explanation, security, and policy decisions. His research is supported by many organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and industrial collaborators.

Jensen regularly serves on program committees for conferences, including the International Conference on Machine Learning, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, and the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He currently serves as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Jensen has also served on the board of directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2005-2013), the Defense Science Study Group (2006-2007), and DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Group (2007-2012). He received outstanding teaching awards from the UMass College of Natural Sciences in 2011 and from the CICS in 2022.  In 2017, one of his papers received the IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award.