On April 28, 2014, New York University launched their Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment Initiative through a poster session, highlighting various projects being worked on through the departments within the Data Science initiative, and a luncheon featuring remarks from members of the NYU and Moore-Sloan community. This event symbolized the commencement of NYU’s initiative to harness the potential of data scientists and big data for basic research and scientific discovery. NYU, along with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington, have started a 5-year, $37.8 million, cross-institutional effort in data science funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In order to obtain this prestigious award, NYU competed nationally with fifteen leading universities in the field of data science and received $12.6 million for its data science enterprise through this initiative.
The launch began with a showcase of about 30 posters featuring the research of NYU professors, Postdoctoral students, PhD students, graduate students, as well as companies connected with the data science initiative. Some project titles included “Big Data for Traffic Safety Performance Evaluation”, “Visual Inter-Comparison of Multifaceted Climate Models”, “Leaders or Followers? Measuring Political Responsiveness in the U.S.
Congress Using Social Media Data”, “Genotet: Interactive Web-based Visual Exploration Framework to Support Validation of Gene Regulatory Networks”, “Social Media and Protest: Information and Influence in Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests”, “Fast Holographic Characterization of Colloidal Particles”, and “Restoring An Image Taken Through a Window Covered with Dirt or Rain”. For more details on all the posters presented, please visit this site: Moore-Sloan Projects
Following the poster session, everyone gathered in the Kimmel Center’s Rosenthal Pavilion for the luncheon portion of the event. Provost David McLaughlin welcomed the guests. He was followed by the Executive Director of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, David Hogg. Hogg offered remarks on the new initiative and introduced the faculty speakers.
- Rob Fergus, Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU, explains an algorithm used to find new planets.
Academic presentations were given by faculty members Kyle Cranmer, Richard Bonneau, Bijan Pesaran, Juliana Freire, Joshua Tucker, and Rob Fergus. They all gave a brief snapshot in to some of the exciting research taking place at NYU. Freire, for example, discussed how she is using data science to improve functions in cities while Pesaran talked about using data in neuroscience. Fergus ended the academic talks with an overview of his research on finding exoplanets using computer vision.
Michael Purugganan, NYU Dean for Science, was next to give remarks. He thanked the representatives of the Sloan and Moore Foundations. Then, he, along with other NYU Data Science community members made a special presentation to the representatives. One of those representatives was Paul Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Joskow said a few words after the presentation. The luncheon ended with Yann LeCun, the founding Director for NYU’s Center for Data Science, discussing research highlights, cosmic philosophy, and the four paradigm in science.
By David Clark