University Of Michigan Launches $100 Million Data Science Initiative
ANN ARBOR (WWJ) - The University of Michigan is making a major investment as part of a "big data" initiative.
The school is planning to invest $100 million over the next five years in a new Data Science initiative that will enhance opportunities for students and researchers across the university to tap into the enormous potential of big data.
Brian Athey, co-director of the new Data Science institute, said big data can provide insights into disease, climate change, social behavior and business.
"It's about Data Science methodologies and the emergence of what we call big data, which is very large collections of information that are so vast and complex that they defy the approaches that we have used in the past to analyze," he said.
The initiative will provide new educational opportunities for students pursuing careers in data science, expand the school's research computing capacity, and strengthen data management, storage, analytics and training resources. More than 40 teachers will be hired over the next four years to support the program.
U-M Provost Martha Pollack said data science has become a fourth approach to scientific discovery, in addition to experimentation, modeling and computation.
"To spur innovation while providing focus, the DSI will launch challenge initiatives in four critical interdisciplinary areas that build on our existing strengths in transportation research, health sciences, learning analytics and social science research," Pollack said in a statement.
In one project at U-M's Mobility Transformation Center, for example, researchers are collecting a continuous stream of data at a rate of 10 times per second from each of nearly 3,000 private cars, trucks and buses on the streets of Ann Arbor in order to test the operation of connected vehicles. The DSI will help collect, store and analyze the huge amount of data being generated even as the number of vehicles expands to more than 20,000.
In medicine and public health, U-M researchers seek to use big data to boost the effectiveness of data-driven biomedical and health research to accelerate the translation from basic research to patient care. By sifting through the massive amount of data generated from DNA sequencing, medical histories and other sources, for example, they are exploring ways to more precisely diagnose or assess an individual's risk for certain types of cancer and to formulate the most effective personalized therapies.
Another novel area of research at U-M is drawing on big data to examine the nature of teaching and learning with the aim of providing instruction tailored to the specific needs of individual students. This will involve gathering and analyzing a rich variety of data from thousands of student activities and experiences to uncover the connections between student behavior and success for different kinds of students.
And in social science, U-M researchers are studying the potential of analyzing massive amounts of data generated by social media to replace or complement conventional surveying techniques as a way to gain insight into a broad range of socioeconomic questions.
As part of the initiative, U-M will also establish the Michigan Institute for Data Science to lead research and educational activities in big data.
