Adam Eck

  • David H. and Margaret W. Barker Associate Professor of Computer Science and Business
  • Chair of Data Science

Areas of Study

Biography

Adam Eck is the David H. and Margaret W. Barker Associate Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Data Science Integrative Concentration at Oberlin College. His primary research and teaching interests include multiagent decision-making in complex environments and applications of machine learning in computational social science and public health.

Eck’s research projects include:

  • Development of planning and reinforcement learning solutions for decision-making in open environments where the set of actors, tasks, and abilities changes over time (e.g., as in robotic wildfire suppression, AI support systems for cybersecurity defense, and autonomous ridesharing services)
  • Utilizing machine learning and data mining to better understand community-level factors related to public health crises including the opioid epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Exploring the use of chatbots for augmenting skilled human workers in the task of survey questionnaire design and other applications of machine learning to aid survey informatics.

Spring 2025

Introduction to Computer Science — CSCI 150

Fall 2025

Applied Machine Learning — CSCI 373

Applied Machine Learning — DATA 373

Data Science Research — DATA 501

News

Agents of Change

March 21, 2025

Fighting wildfires is difficult, dangerous work that puts the lives of firefighters at risk. But what if we had a more efficient way to extinguish these fires while putting fewer people in harm’s way? David H. and Margaret W. Barker Associate Professor of Computer Science and Business Adam Eck just might have the solution: highly specialized robots, powered by artificial intelligence, that have learned how to respond to and suppress these unpredictable natural disasters.

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