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Program Seeks to Nurture 'data Science Culture' at Universities


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Credit: The New York Times

Academia at New York University (NYU), the University of Washington, and the University of California, Berkeley are collaborating on the Sloan Foundation's five-year Digital Information Technology program. "What this partnership is trying to do is change the culture of universities to create a data science culture," says program director Joshua Greenberg.

NYU professor Yann LeCun says the three-university collaboration aims to create a new data science environment. At each university, 12 to 15 professors will be the core participants representing the life, environmental, physical, and social sciences. Each campus also will have a data science studio staffed by data scientists and software professionals, where researchers from different disciplines will share ideas and techniques. The partnership is designed to be a demonstration project that other universities can emulate.

Data and data science should become common ground and share a common language across disciplines, says University of Washington professor Edward Lazowska. Part of that common ground is to create software tools for data handling and analysis that can be widely shared. The professors say pursuing that goal will require creating new, long-term career paths for the data scientists that develop such tools.

From The New York Times
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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