A Joint Taskforce on Undergraduate Data Science Curriculum: An Introduction and Opportunity for Feedback

This lightning talk describes the current effort and status to create recommended curriculum competencies for undergraduate data science programs. In 2023, the ACM Education Board established and chartered a task force to extend the ACM Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Curricula by producing a multidisciplinary set of competencies for data science with representatives from computing, statistics, and applied mathematics societies. ACM published guidelines in 2021 for delivering appropriate computing competencies in data science programs while acknowledging that computing is one major component of data science, along with mathematics and statistics, along with other components. The ACM Education Board recognized the need to expand on this work and invited participation from numerous statistics and mathematics societies to create a more complete set of guidelines. To that end, the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) joined the ACM to form a joint task force that would expand on the computing elements and add other appropriate components. This lightning talk will present the status of that effort and provide a means to solicit feedback and input on this process. This session should interest all SIGCSE attendees, especially those developing curricula in Data Science.