We have identified the following three research themes at the UCD4IDS around which both research and education revolve. Note that these three themes are not disjoint; there are ample intersections between them and several participants are involved in multiple themes.

1. Fundamentals of machine learning directed toward biological and medical applications;
2. Optimization theory and algorithms for machine learning including numerical solvers for large-scale nonconvex and nonsmooth learning problems; and
3. High-dimensional data analysis on graphs and networks.

We also note that even though our proposed research is of fundamental nature, it is applicable to a wide variety of application domains. We will leverage our campus' strengths and use biology and medical applications (including veterinary medicine) both to serve as the data source and the motivation to drive the data science innovations.