another bridge between the fields of computer science and chemistry, Hellerstein suggests. It could make chemistry more interesting to computer scientists, who in the past might have viewed their collaborations with domain scientists as unfulfilling high-end IT support. And “it may be that for some class of big data problems in chemistry, we can repurpose software engineering methodologies,” he says.
At its core, this is about “the structure of knowledge,” Hellerstein says.
“I think we’re at an interesting transition point in terms of the balance of what kind of work gets done in industry and what kind of work gets done in university,” Hellerstein says.
The explorations he describes—which verge on the philosophical, but also have very real practical applications for domain scientists—need the “incubation of an academic environment without commercial pressure,” he says.
The Moore/Sloan effort will focus on making these connections between scientists and leading edge data science tools and techniques. The goal is a “virtuous cycle” in which those tools drive new discoveries, and the discoveries—and scientific needs they point to—in turn inform the creation of the next generation of tools.
The science-focused foundations began evaluating 15 elite universities late last year and spent the early part of 2013 winnowing the field before selecting the three participating universities, which will also contribute their own funding for faculty, campus space, and support to the effort.
The roughly $2.5 million a year flowing to each university through this grant is a small drop in the bucket compared to the $1 billion-plus in external research grants and contracts the UW alone receives in a given year.
But because it’s narrowly focused, it could have an outsize impact.
“It takes what we’ve been doing at the eScience Institute on a shoestring and boosts it to center scale,” Lazowska says.
Perhaps as important is the national recognition coming with the award, announced Tuesday at a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy event.
The UW’s participation consolidates the Seattle-area’s position as a center of innovation in big data technologies. And it builds on programs including the eScience Institute—which received funding from the Moore Foundation—and the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, a first-of-its kind effort begun in 1999 to bring together statisticians and researchers in anthropology, economics, sociology, geography, global health, social work and other fields.
The grant would support five data scientists specializing in software, four post-doctoral fellows working on data science and another research discipline, and partially fund four researchers in other departments. There will also be a “data science studio” established as a physical place for this cross-campus collaboration to occur.
A researcher or graduate student would “embed” in the studio for a month or a quarter or half a year to work with data scientists and software programmers on a specific project—such as analysis of a large dataset or help identifying and using an appropriate cloud computing resource—and hopefully develop a solution that could be used on similar problems in other fields.
At the same time, the UW has won a $2.8 million National Science Foundation grant to fund inter-disciplinary graduate programs to train dozens of graduate students from across campus on how to apply data science methodologies to their research.
Loebman sees this as a tremendous opportunity for those who would follow a career path similar to hers.
“Had I started grad school over again and had the opportunity to do a program like what they’re putting together now,” she say. “I absolutely would have done it.”
For an even deeper dive into the connections between big data and science, buy your ticket now for Xconomy’s November 19 forum Big Insight—Making Sense of Big Data in Seattle. Speakers include Lazowska and Hellerstein. The full agenda is available here.
