UR announces $50 million 'Big Data' plan

The University of Rochester will spend $50 million to establish itself as a leader in the evolving field of "big data" research — constructing a 50,000-square-foot home for a new Institute for Data Science and hiring at least 20 new faculty members.

"We intend for the University of Rochester to be among the world's leaders in this new discipline," said UR president Joel Seligman.

The initiative is expected to trigger economic development beyond the campus boundaries.

"If you want to create a 21st century knowledge-based economy, what you want to have is prowess in cutting-edge fields like data science," Seligman said.

He announced the commitment Friday at the start of the 2013 Big Data Forum held on campus.

The university plans to raise $50 million through donations and other sources for the $25 million building that will be constructed adjacent to Hopeman Hall, and to establish an endowment to operate the institute.

Big data is the popular term used to describe the huge amount of information created and stored in computerized systems. Examples include financial transactions, social media posts, radio signals, medical testing, sensors used to gather climate information, and GPS signals from cell phones. Data science is the work of finding ways to extract meaning from that large-scale data.

Experts estimate a demand for as many as 200,000 technical specialists by 2018 to support the growing field. UR has already created a customized master's program in data science for Xerox Corp. engineers, and an undergraduate data science program is being developed.

In the past five years, the university spent about $50 million for new faculty, staff and computing infrastructure, such as an IBM Blue Gene/Q super computer. That investment resulted in about 100 researchers being awarded about $300 million in research funding.

UR researchers have already used the tools they have to model and predict the spread of infectious disease, track the spread of political ideas and predict the existence of planets.

Currently, the university's expertise is spread among many departments and depends on individual researchers to make connections and share ideas. The new Institute for Data Science will bring the faculty members together with adequate the resources needed to pursue their work, UR officials said.

New faculty members will be recruited in many areas, but the common thread will be data science as a fundamental component of their work, UR staff said.

"Our primary objective is to create an institution of the highest academic quality, but it is well known that institutions in fields like this, such as Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, have been magnets for associated businesses who benefit from the kind of research that's done here," Seligman said.

While the plan is part of the university's 2013-2018 strategic plan, Seligman said he expects the needed money will be raised, and the new building will be constructed, "well before 2018 by a considerable margin."

"Things are already moving. We are in the midst of recruiting seven new faculty members already," he said.

Examples of big data

RFID (radio frequency ID) systems generate up to 1,000 times the data of conventional bar code systems.

In four hours on Black Friday 2012, Walmart handled 10 million cash register transactions.

United Parcel Service receives on average 39.5 million tracking requests from customers daily.

Visa processes more than 172,800,000 card transactions each day.

Twitter users send 500 million tweets a day.

More than 5 billion people are calling, texting, tweeting and browsing websites on mobile phones.

Source: SAS

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