A workshop on big data was recently organized at Texas A&M University to foster connections across disciplines that intersect this area and help people to identify opportunities for collaboration.
There are many researchers across Texas A&M whose current or emerging research falls under the auspices of big data methods, systems or applications, and there are currently opportunities at the federal level for major funding of cross-disciplinary projects in data science.
Dr. Nick Duffield, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dr. Dilma Da Silva, department head in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M, organized the workshop to address these possible collaborations.
“I hoped that one outcome of the workshop was for researchers at Texas A&M to create teams that can submit strong proposals for this funding,” Duffield said. “The workshop achieved its aims in helping to link overlapping interests in big data. A number of attendees told me that they enjoyed hearing about the problems the speakers were working on, and that these had suggested collaboration opportunities that they were previously unaware of.”
The Big Data Workshop enabled many researchers across the university to describe their problems in short 15 minute presentations with a discussion period at the end of each.
Participants heard about challenges of large-scale data science in applications to physics and astronomy, materials science, agricultural engineering, geosciences, hydrology, business and marketing, digital humanities, systems and methods statistics, and computer science and engineering.
Duffield hopes to continue this collaboration by making the workshop a yearly event. Together with Da Silva and Dr. Yu Ding in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, he is organizing a Big Data Colloquium series that can host longer talks from Texas A&M researchers and host leading external speakers in the field.