About

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 (Office of Research Integrity), 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 the University of Colorado at Boulder, Acuña was an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He 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.

Daniel leads the Science of Science and Computational Discovery Lab and his coordinates are:

Daniel Acuña
Associate Professor

115J ECNW
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309
map

Selected publications

• Acuna DE, Teplitskiy M, Evans J, Kording K (2022), Author-suggested reviewers rate manuscripts much more favorably: A cross-sectional analysis of the neuroscience section of PLOS ONE. PLOS ONE
• Acuna DE, Liang L. (2021) Are AI Ethics Conferences Different and More Diverse Compared to Traditional Computer Science Conferences?, Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
• Acuna, DE (2020) Some considerations for studying gender, mentorship, and scientific impact: commentary on AlShebli, Makovi, and Rahwan, OSF Preprints
• Liang., L., Acuna, DE (2020) Artificial mental phenomena: Psychophysics as a framework to detect perception biases in AI models In Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* ’20)
• Líenard, JF, Achakulvisut, T, Acuna, DE, David, SV, Intellectual Synthesis in Mentorship Determines Success in Academic Careers (2018), Nature Communications, (press release in Nature Asia)
• Acuna, DE, Brooks, P, Kording, P (2018) Bioscience-scale automated detection of figure element reuse BioArXiv, (related article in Nature News)
• Ramkumar P, Acuna DE, Berniker M, Grafton S, Turner RS, Körding KP. (2016) Chunking as the result of an efficiency–computation tradeoff. Nature Communication
• Acuna, DE, Berniker, M, Fernandes, H, Kording, K (2015) Using psychophysics to ask if the brain samples or maximizes, Journal of Vision
• Acuna, DE, Allesina, S., Kording, KP, (2012) Future impact: Predicting scientific success, Nature

Recently funded projects

• PI: Daniel E. Acuna, DDHS: Office of Research Integrity: (Conference grant) Computational Research Integrity Conference (CRI-CONF 2022), 9/1/2021 - 8/31/2022
• PI: Daniel E. Acuna: US’s Office of Research Integrity: Large-scale High-Quality Labeled Datasets and Competitions to Advance Artificial Intelligence for Computational Research Integrity, 10/01/2020 - 09/01/2022
• co-PI: Daniel E. Acuna, PI: David Popp (Maxwell School) Sloan Foundation: Does government funding change what you do? The effects of funding on the direction and impact of academic energy research, 6/1/2020 - 5/30/2022
• co-PI: Daniel E. Acuna, co-PI: Stephen David (Oregon) NSF-SciSIP: Collaborative Research: Social Dynamics of Knowledge Transfer Through Scientific Mentorship and Publication, 10/1/2019 - 9/30/2022
• PI: Daniel E. Acuna, DDHS: Office of Research Integrity: (Conference grant) Computational Research Integrity Conference (CRI-CONF), 9/1/2019 - 8/31/2020
• PI: Daniel E. Acuna, DDHS: Office of Research Integrity: Human-centered automatic tracing, detection, and evaluation of image and data tampering, 9/1/2019 - 8/31/2021
• PI: Daniel E. Acuna, DDHS: Office of Research Integrity: Methods and tools for scalable figure reuse detection with statistical certainty, Award ORI2018000296, 8/1/2018 - 7/31/2020
• PI: Daniel E. Acuna, co-PIs: Konrad Kording (UPenn), James Evans (U of Chicago) NSF-SciSIP: Optimizing Scientific Peer Review, Award #1800956, 7/1/2018 - 6/30/2022

News

• New grant for Computational Research Integrity Conference 2023 - details soon
• Successfully ran the Science of Science Summer School (S4) 2021 and awarded six micro-grants
• Organizing and running Computational Research Integrity Conference 2021
• Presentation at International Conference of Social Computing (virtual)
• New grant from the US’s Office of Research Integrity: Large-scale High-Quality Labeled Datasets and Competitions to Advance Artificial Intelligence for Computational Research Integrity.
• New grant from Sloan Foundation to study the effects of funding on the direction and impact of academic energy research (as co-PI with David Popp) News
• Summer School on Science of Science postponed until next year August 2 - 6, 2021 in the iSchool of Syracuse University!
• New grant from Sloan Foundation to study the effects of funding on the direction and impact of academic energy research (as co-PI with David Popp) News

Media

• Interview for The New Yorker (2021) How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective
• Interview for Nature News (2020) Pioneering duplication detector trawls thousands of coronavirus preprints
• Mention in Nature Machine Learning Editorial (2020) A match for virtual conferences
• Mention in Nature News (2020) Publishers launch joint effort to tackle altered images in research papers
• Nature Feature interview about Elisabeth Bik (2020) Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers
• Interview for Nature News (2018) Researchers have finally created a tool to spot duplicated images across thousands of papers

Travel

• August 22 - 24, 2022: Ray Summit Meetup and Ray Summit 2022, San Francisco, CA
• June 7 - 9, 2022: International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI), Washington, DC
• January 27 - 30, 2020 ACM FAT Conference Barcelona, Spain
• November 6 - 10, 2019 Data Science Leadership Summit, Santa Fe, New Mexico
• October 14 - 16, 2019 Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy, Atlanta, Georgia
• September 5 - 8, 2019 Metascience 2019 Symposium, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
• June 11 - 12, 2019 International Conference on Science of Science, Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, China
• June 2 - 5, 2019 6th World Conference on Research Integrity, Hong Kong
• May 22-23, 2019 2019 Research Integrity Conference, Chicago, IL
• May 10, 2019, University of Rochester, Rocherster, NY
• March 31 - April 3, 2019, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
• March 20, 2019 Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

News archive

• Paper accepted for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAT) 2020 in Barcelona, Spain!
• Funded NSF grant to study mentorship in science.
• A research grant and a conference grant funded by ORI. Inaugual Conference on Computational Research Integrity to be announced soon.
• Best poster award, Metascience 2019 conference (with Ph.D. student Han Zhuang)
• October 14 - 16, 2019 A talk and poster accepted to the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy
• June 2 - 5, 2019 Oral presentation at the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity, Hong Kong
• May 10, 2019 Invited speaker to the 8th Annual Ethics in Biomedical Research Lecture, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
• March 31 - April 3, 2019 Short paper presentation iConference 2019, University of Maryland
• March 20, 2019 Invited talk at Symposium of Yotta Informatics, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
• Feb 14 - 15, 2019 Attending Rich Context Competition Workshop, NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
• Nov 2018 New publication Intellectual synthesis in mentorship determines success in academic careers in Nature Communications, press release in Nature Asia
• July 2018 The Office of Research Integrity DDHS has generously funded our grant Methods and tools for scalable figure reuse detection with statistical certainty reporting
• June 2018 NSF has generously funded our grant Optimizing scientific peer review (in collaboration with James Evans from U of Chicago and Konrad Körding from UPenn)
• February 2018 Nature featured our pre-print on Bioscience-scale automated detection of figure element reuse