The University of Michigan will invest $100 million into a new data-science initiative aimed at working with big data sets that can further research into such things as driverless cars, medicine and climate change, the school announced on Monday.
The money will pay for 35 new faculty members to be hired over the course of the next five years, support interdisciplinary data-related research and expand U-M’s research computing capacity, the school said.
Research in big data centers on huge data sets that researchers analyze in an effort to find patterns that can help solve problems.
How big? Researchers in U-M’s School of Information and College of Engineering analyzed 1.2 billion tweets to study how rumors spread.
Researchers at U-M’s Mobility Transformation Center are collecting a stream of data from nearly 3,000 private cars, trucks and other vehicles in Ann Arbor to help with connected vehicle studies that could influence driverless vehicles. Each vehicle sends data at a rate of 10 times per second.
In medicine, U-M researchers are sifting data from DNA sequencing, medical histories and other sources to try to find better ways to diagnose or assess individual’s risk for certain types of cancers and treatment plan.
“Big data is revolutionizing research in an extraordinary range of disciplines,” said Jack Hu, the university’s interim vice president for research, in a news release. “With this initiative, our goal is to spark innovation in research across campus while inspiring further advances in the techniques of data science itself.”
U-M officials hope to use the money to further increase the amount of interdisciplinary research.
When Mark Schlissel took over as U-M president before the start of the last academic year, he said was attracted to U-M because of the university’s excellence across all disciplines.
He told the Free Press he found that was true as he spent his first year learning about U-M.
“My job is to provide resources and encourage faculty,” he said in an interview before the program was announced. “We have the ability to bring together people from various disciplines to focus in on big societal problems. That’s something we can do.”
In a news release announcing the program, he echoed those thoughts.
“Big data can provide dramatic insights into the nature of disease, climate change, social behavior, business and economics, engineering and the basic biological and physical sciences,” he said. “With our widely recognized strengths across all of these areas and our longstanding culture of collaboration across disciplines, U-M is in a unique position to leverage this investment in data science for the good of society.”
The initiative will launch with a daylong symposium on Oct. 6.
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