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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) provides Ph.D. students with the unique interdisciplinary training necessary to extract useful information from vast amounts of collected data. Consumer opinions, information on disease and its symptoms, and breaking information on social websites allow us to gather information on a scale… more »

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) provides Ph.D. students with the unique interdisciplinary training necessary to extract useful information from vast amounts of collected data. Consumer opinions, information on disease and its symptoms, and breaking information on social websites allow us to gather information on a scale previously unknown. However, such big data is useful only if we can extract information from it. Columbia and CUNY, in collaboration with international partners in Argentina and Brazil, propose the interdisciplinary training of students in making sense of big data. Researchers from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Psychology, and Statistics will partner with Biomedical Informatics, Business and Journalism, to educate the next generation of information scientists in solving real world problems. We will train students to extract information from multiple data types – text, video, audio – and familiarize them with a wide range of techniques for making sense of information from a world in which Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are supplanting newspapers, encyclopedias, television, and consumer surveys as everyday sources of information.

Broader Impacts: A curriculum based upon the concept of studio learning will integrate techniques from Business, Journalism, and Biomedical Informatics. Aided by advisors from large corporations, major research labs, and small start-up companies, the program will encourage IGERT trainees to pursue patents, and to apply their research in society. A second goal will be attracting more diverse students to information sciences by emphasizing real world applications, a supportive environment, and diverse faculty role models. The mentoring and career development activities proposed will help to retain this diverse population and prepare them for their future careers.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit. « less