About

Daniel Ernesto 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

• 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 - 8/31/2020
• 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

• 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. Upcoming Summer School on Science of Science - August 3 - 7, 2020 in the iSchool of Syracuse University!
• A research grant and a conference grant funded by ORI. Inaugual Conference on Computational Research Integrity to be announced soon.

Upcoming travel

• June 23 - 15, 2020 Computational Research Integrity Conference 2020, Washington, DC
• 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