Efforts to launch the theory-focused institute were supported by the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) with faculty from the Colleges of Engineering, Sciences and Computing. Xiaoming Huo, principal investigator and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), will serve as the executive director of TRIAD. “The establishment of TRIAD is tremendously beneficial considering data science is a phenomenon that brings with it so many opportunities. There is a lot of research that needs to be conducted in this emerging field, and we will focus on building the theoretical foundations to establish the principles of data science,” said Huo.
“With the launch of TRIAD and the already well-established NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub, Georgia Tech plays a key role nationally in data science from theory to applications to building community partnerships,” said Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of IDEaS and a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.
Dana Randall, fellow co-executive director and professor in the School of Computer Science, said, “Advances in data science foundations can lead to revolutionary new solutions for analyzing data. TRIAD will accelerate this research by bridging fields to expand our collective capabilities.”
Both Aluru and Randall serve as co-principal investigators of TRIAD, along with Prasad Tetali, a professor in the School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science, and Jeff Wu, the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and a professor in ISyE. “The emphasis on theoretical foundations (of data science) offers a great opportunity for mathematicians to actively engage with other scientists and help make breakthroughs in this fast growing interdisciplinary field," said Tetali.
The analysis of massive, dynamic, noisy and complex data arising in virtually every sphere of human activity is a pressing problem of our time. NSF is responding by dedicating $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes, including TRIAD. Encompassing 14 institutions in 11 states, these projects will promote long-term research and training activities in data science that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
“Data is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation,” said Jim Kurose, NSF assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). “These new TRIPODS projects will help build the theoretical foundations of data science that will enable continued data-driven discovery and breakthroughs across all fields of science and engineering.”
According to NSF, the TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, enhanced visualization capabilities and more. They also support innovative educational pathways to train the next generation of data scientists.
TRIAD will bring together senior, mid-career and junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and data science practitioners at large using focused working groups, national and international workshops and organized innovation labs. It will build an intellectual atmosphere to connect stakeholders from across the nation and the world on a regular basis.
Initially, TRIAD will focus on four research topics: advanced mathematical modeling for contemporary data; new inferential strategies that can be both scalable and de-centralized; efficient optimization tools with theoretical guarantees; and applications in the context of large datasets from domains including biology, design, manufacturing, logistics and sustainability.
TRIAD will launch with 39 committed faculty members from across Georgia Tech, including from ISyE, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Mathematics, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Computational Science and Engineering and the School of Computer Science.
NSF’s award establishes TRIAD as a Phase I investment. It may be subsequently expanded to Phase II through a second competitive proposal process.
]]>Director of Communications and Grant Writing, Institute for Data Engineering and Science
]]>The need to efficiently analyze large, complex data sets is a growing challenge, and one that scholars from all areas need to tackle. With this in mind, Georgia Tech launched the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science (TRIAD) on Oct. 3.
TRIAD is part of a larger National Science Foundation (NSF) project, the Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science, in which 14 institutions across 11 states collaborate on long-term big data research and training. With a $1.5 million NSF award, Georgia Tech is able to bring researchers from four of its six colleges together, representing fields such as theoretical computer science, mathematics, and statistics.
“This diversity is one of the key elements of this project,” said Stephen Cross, executive vice president for research. “New ideas come from being at the boundaries of all these fields.”
The College of Computing (CoC) has been involved in the project since the beginning. School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Srinivas Aluru and School of Computer Science (SCS) ADVANCE Professor of Computing Dana Randall are on TRIAD’s management team. As co-directors of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science, which submitted the NSF proposal, they already research the impact of big data but praise TRIAD’s interdisciplinary approach.
“Everyone on campus is doing something involving algorithms,” Randall said. “You can use an existing algorithm, but if you think about a problem from scratch, you can make breakthroughs.”
The community research aspect of TRIAD will be carried out by up to 40 professors and more than 250 students. The research will focus on four issues:
The first phase of TRIAD will facilitate interdisciplinary research through working groups; national and international week-long workshops featuring research presentations, tutorials, poster sessions, and panels; and organized innovation labs.
SCS Assistant Professor Jake Abernethy, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Sebastian Pokutta, and Mathematics Professor Prasad Tetali (who also holds a joint appointment in SCS) will host the first workshop on machine learning, optimization, and decision making from March 5 to 9, 2018.
Also look forward to more CoC workshops on campus throughout the spring, such as the one on algorithms and randomness led by SCS faculty Algorithms & Randomness Center Director Eric Vigoda, Professor Santosh Vempala, and Tetali from May 14 to 17, 2018.
Other CSE faculty will serve as senior investigators: Bistra Dilkina and Haesun Park.
“Our goal is to have Georgia Tech be seen as the go-to place for data science and machine learning,” said Professor Irfan Essa, associate dean for research in the College of Computing and director of the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. “This is something we’re really engaged with and invested in.”
The rapid growth of data seems wild and limitless. But various Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes have been making theoretical sense of it.
TRIPODS institutes receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Among them is Georgia Tech’s TRIAD – the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science, which is directed by Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Xiaoming Huo. TRIAD researchers are poised to share data science insights with the Atlanta higher education community.
Meanwhile, NSF aims to expand the scope of TRIPODS institutes. Today the agency awarded 19 collaborative projects at 23 universities. The awards are called TRIPODS+X grants. X is the scope-expanding activity; it could be research, visioning, or education.
Among the award recipients is Georgia Tech’s project: TRIPODS+X:EDU Collaborative Education: Data-driven Discovery and Alliance, led by Prasad Tetali, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Georgia Tech.
The award to Georgia Tech and its alliance partners – Agnes Scott, Morehouse, and Spellman Colleges – aims to train a diverse workforce for the inevitable data-driven future. The project will also engage faculty at the minority-serving institutions to help them teach data science and develop related curricula.
"TRIPODS+X is exciting not only for its near-term impact addressing some of society's most important scientific challenges, but [also] because of its potential for developing tools for future applications," says Anne Kinney, NSF assistant director Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
With the $200,000 TRIPODS+X:EDU grant, the alliance partners will develop undergraduate data-science-focused courses. Through boot camps, workshops, and other joint activities, they will prepare data science modules to integrate into science curricula at the partner institutions. The goal is to prepare students who can address the emerging challenges in data science.
“The NSF-supported educational alliance is exciting in many ways,” says Prasad Tetali.
“It gives an opportunity to infuse the foundational data science curriculum with real-world applications from the physical and life sciences,” Tetali says. “It will also likely catalyze collaborative research in data science and related fields between Georgia Tech and Atlanta area colleges.”
Following are the individuals involved in the TRIPODS+X: EDU project:
Principal Investigators
Senior Personnel
Photo Caption
From left to right, top row: Joshua Weitz, Justin Romberg, and David Sherrill; middle row: Alan Koch, Brandeis Marshall, Chris DePree, and Wenjing Liao; bottom row: Thinh Doan, Prasad Tetali, and Chuang Peng
]]>Joshua Chamot
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