About

Daniel Acuña is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. The goal of his current research is to understand decision making in science—from helping hiring committees to predict future academic success to removing the potential biases that scientists and funding agencies commit during peer review. To achieve these tasks, Dr. Acuna harnesses vast datasets about scientific activities and applies Machine Learning and A.I. to uncover rules that make publication, collaboration, and funding decisions more successful. Simultaneously, he has created tools to improve literature search, peer review, and detect scientific fraud. He has grants from NSF, DDHS, and DARPA and his work has been featured in Nature Podcast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and the Scientist.

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

Selected publications

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), pre-print version
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)
Teplitskiy, M, Acuna, DE, Elamrani-Raoult, A, Körding, K, Evans, J (2018) The sociology of scientific validity: How professional networks shape judgement in peer review, Research Policy
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

Current projects

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 - 09/01/2021
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 - 9/30/2021
PI: Daniel E. Acuna, DDHS: Office of Research Integrity: (Conference grant) Computational Research Integrity Conference (CRI-CON), 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 - 6/30/2021

News

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
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.

Upcoming travel

January 27 - 30, 2020 ACM FAT Conference Barcelona, Spain

News archive

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

Past travels

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