David Jensen

David Jensen is a Professor at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he is the current Director and Founder of  the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory. He served as the Director of the Computational Social Science Institute from 2018 to 2022. Jensen’s research focuses on machine learning and causal modeling, with a focus in analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems, with the goals of furthering prediction, explanation, security, and policy decisions.

He currently serves as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and has served on the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, the Defense Science Study Group, and DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Group.  He received outstanding teaching awards from the UMass College of Natural Sciences in 2011 and from the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences in 2022.  In 2017, one of his papers received the IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award. Prior to joining the UMass faculty, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. He  received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992.