Daniel Acuña

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Affiliate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder
Daniel Acuña is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He leads the Science of Science and Computational Discovery Lab. He works in science of science, a subfield of computational social science, and A.I. for science. He writes papers and builds web-based software tools to accelerate knowledge discovery.

Daniel’s research aims to understand historical relationships, mechanisms, and optimization opportunities of knowledge production. Daniel harnesses vast datasets about publications and citations and applies Machine Learning and A.I. to uncover rules that make publication, collaboration, and funding decisions more successful. Recently, he has been interested in biases in artificial intelligence and developing methods for detecting them. In addition, he has created tools to improve literature search, peer review, and detect scientific fraud. He has been funded by NSF, DDHS, Sloan Foundation, and DARPA through the SCORE project, and his work has been featured in Nature News, Nature Podcast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and the Scientist.

In addition to his research, Daniel enjoys building communities around science of science and research integrity. He co-organizes the Science of Science Summer School (S4), the Computational Research Integrity (CRI-CONF) conference, and the Computational Research Integrity competitions. In addition, he is part of the ACM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) council, contributing to the social justice initiative on publications, awards, and peer review.

Before joining Syracuse University, Acuña studied a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. During his graduate studies, he received a NIH Neuro-physical-computational Sciences (NPCS) Graduate Training Fellowship, NIPS Travel Award, and a CONICYT-World Bank Fellowship. Daniel was born in Santiago, Chile, where he attended the University of Santiago.