Hi there 👋

Daniel Hardesty Lewis

Data Scientist and Researcher

I build interpretable machine learning systems and scalable geospatial infrastructure for high-stakes decision support.

I am a Research Assistant at Columbia University working with Ali Hirsa on explainable and distributionally robust ML for financial forecasting. Previously, I spent 5+ years at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) scaling climate and flood models, including work supporting the $40M Texas Disaster Information System (TDIS).

I founded Summit Geospatial (terrain data for Texas) and co-founded PoliBOM (tariff intelligence).

Links: dlewis.ai | LinkedIn | Email

Focus areas

• Interpretable and distributionally robust ML for forecasting and decision support
• End-to-end geospatial pipelines (source data to web delivery)
• HPC workflows for climate, terrain, and hydrology workloads

Selected work

• Properlytic: home price forecasting and interactive mapping
• Texas Disaster Information System (TDIS): statewide disaster data platform
  • GLO overview
  • IDRT page
  • TDIS portal
• MINT Platform (DARPA World Modelers): model integration and intelligent interfaces
  • DARPA World Modelers
• Arctic research programs: navigating national-scale environmental uncertainty
  • Navigating the New Arctic (NNA)
• Geomorphology and flood hazard research
  • Paola Passalacqua, 2022 Ralph Alger Bagnold Medal

Experience

• 2024 - Present: Research Assistant, Columbia University (Financial Engineering)
• 2023 - Present: Founder, Summit Geospatial
• 2024 - Present: Co-founder, PoliBOM
• 2021 - 2023: Senior Data Scientist and Technical Lead, Texas Advanced Computing Center
• 2018 - 2021: Data Scientist and Research Engineer, Texas Advanced Computing Center
• 2018 - 2020: Co-instructor, University of Texas at Austin

Technical stack

Languages: Python, SQL, Bash, TypeScript, C++, Fortran, PL/pgSQL
ML: PyTorch, SHAP, variational inference
Geospatial: GDAL, GeoPandas, Rasterio, PostGIS
Infra: CUDA, Docker, HPC batch workflows
Visualization: Plotly Dash, web-first mapping

Selected Publications

• Artificial Intelligence for Modeling Complex Systems: Taming the Complexity of Expert Models to Improve Decision Making
• An Intelligent Interface for Integrating Climate, Hydrology, Agriculture, and Socioeconomic Models
• A Semantic Model Catalog to Support Comparison and Reuse

Contact

Website: https://dlewis.ai
Email: [email protected]
GitHub: https://github.com/dhardestylewis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhardestylewis/
Location: New York, NY