The Data Science Institute facilitates collaboration across an increasingly diverse and active Data Science community by providing workforce development, essential technological assistance, and training to University partners. Formerly Data7, the Data Science Institute aims to foster the next generation of data-driven research by encouraging university-wide interdisciplinary collaboration, gaining external visibility, developing industry alliances, and increasing funding for research at the University of Arizona (UA).
The Data Science Institute embodies seven pillars of Data Science excellence at the UA: Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics, Information Sciences, Engineering, Interdisciplinary Collaborations, and Innovation. By connecting UA researchers and aligning institutional expertise, computational resources, and infrastructure, the Institute enables investigators to ask more complex questions and achieve outcomes not easily attainable as individual investigators or within purely disciplinary teams. DSI provides initial support to UA research projects by funding part-time graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, technical staff, and computational infrastructure – all working to start new collaborations or broaden existing collaborations.
Vision: Solve bigger questions together.
Mission: Facilitate and foster data-driven, transdisciplinary collaborations.
Goals:
Opportunities with Data Science
Working in teams across disciplines opens up opportunities for new discoveries and new knowledge. The fundamentals of data science – machine learning, data mining, visualization, scalability – arise from multiple departments and are used to answer multifaceted questions. To find the true value within data sets, experts from multiple departments working as cohesive teams are required.
In other words, you need a village (or a university) of experts to dig in and pull apart the available data. That’s what DSI enables. For more information, email the Data Science Institute at rii-datascienceinstitute@arizona.edu.
Open Innovation, Collaboration-Driven
How do you transform problems into solutions? By asking questions. By exploring wider and digging deeper. By taking answers and turning them into new, more interesting questions. And by fostering open innovation.
Data Science Institute assembles teams with expertise that spans computational and information science and infrastructure and domain sciences in order to ask more complex questions and get more nuanced answers. In turn, these answers lead to new questions and new knowledge. To maintain leadership in open innovation, we must work in collaboration-driven teams committed to pushing the boundaries.
For more information, email the Data Science Institute at rii-datascienceinstitute@arizona.edu(link sends e-mail).
Retaining UA expertise
Research is not just powered by CPUs. Human Powered Units (HPUs) are essential in order to drive innovative thinking and extract knowledge from massive data sets.
With significant demand globally for trained data scientists both in academia and industry, recruiting and retaining this expertise on campus is critical. An emphasis for DSI is to build capacity and expand the community of data scientists and technologists (HPUs) for the University of Arizona campus - providing the opportunity and avenue for researchers to expand their collaborative network, and improve data science skills and awareness.
Data Science Literacy
Data Science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, merging techniques from computer science, statistics, and math with domain-level concepts to increase discovery through data analytics and visualization. However, taking advantage of advanced computational resources and the "big data revolution" requires a set of specialized skills and core competencies.
The Data Science Institute works closely with the broader campus community to support a variety of learning activities. Examples include Data and Software Carpentry training, vendor-provided training (Cloud, Machine Learning, GPU etc.) in collaboration with UITS, and organizing special topic workshops (Containers, Workflow Managers). To foster Data Science Literacy, the Institute partners with the Data Science Research & Training (DSRT) Steering Committee, and many campus trainers in support of teaching the computational and data science necessary for today's research needs. The Data Science Institute is also connected with the UA Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) effort, focused on the theoretical foundations of Data Science.
Fast-Evolving Technology
Because technology evolves rapidly, it is critical to assemble a team of experts that is well versed in technology landscape. Data Science Institute researchers actively engage with faculty developing new technologies, tools, and methods, leveraging these in a pragmatic and productive manner.
For more information, email the Data Science Institute at rii-datascienceinstitute@arizona.edu.
Contact the Data Science Institute to learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals. The Data Science Institute is located in the BioSciences Research Laboratories (BSRL) building at 1230 N. Cherry Ave. Email the Data Science Institute at RII-DataScienceInstitute@arizona.edu to schedule an appointment to meet in-person or via Zoom.
Primary funding for the University of Arizona Data Science Institute (Data7) is made available from the Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF) provided by the taxpayers of the State of Arizona.