The focus of the faculty Meetup is on building campus wide faculty relationships, discovering unique assets (data sets, tools and partnership) already available at Rice, and forming exploratory collaboration groups. Our hope is that the Meet Up will serve to initiate conversations and research and scholarship collaborations that will position Rice to seek additional funding for research and scholarship as well as create lasting partnerships that will help develop and explore new education and research directions.
What is the Data Science Meetup? The Meetup is organized as a poster session and networking event designed for faculty to showcase their data driven research and scholarship. This is an opportunity to let people know what problems you can solve using Data Science tools or to showcase your research and discover ways in which Data Science tools can help you gain new insight from your data. It is important to note that this is primarily meant to be a faculty event.
How can you participate? Faculty-led research groups are strongly encouraged to prepare a poster highlighting their dataX research. Due to space limitations, we can only guarantee space for one poster per faculty led research group. While is is critically important that faculty participate in the Meetup presenting and discussing research collaboration opportunities we also suggest you consider inviting one or two to join you to present the work.
What is Data Science? Data Science is the extraction of knowledge from large volumes of data that are structured or unstructured. “Knowledge discovery” is a term also commonly used to describe data science. The role of Data Scientists has been described as part analyst and part artist. In our data driven world, we are increasingly finding that insights can be ‘data-enabled’ and solutions ‘data-inspired’.
Who should be interested in Data Science? You! independent of your field of study or research. Data Science is a very broad field and applies to many many more fields than just computer science, engineering or science. Data determines not only how much we pay for insurance or how we shop for cars, but also how we test for cancer, how we approach urban development, and how we teach and learn (all subjects from music to math!). Data is used to create advertisements that follow a person from site to site on the Internet, influences how we think about the city, how we visualize historical events, how we run political elections, how we manage traffic and transportation, and how we understand patterns across hundreds or thousands of literary texts. It is important to recognize that Data Science is not about ‘Science’ but rather about Data and what you can do with and to data to discover causal relationships and expand knowledge.
Why should you attend the Data Science Meetup? To network and collaborate with your colleagues across the University. Your colleagues may be doing research that could greatly benefit you and your research. The opportunity to cross disciplinary fields in research has never been greater!
No poster? No problem! We strongly encourage you to attend. This is a great opportunity to network with your colleagues at Rice. (Note, if you are submitting an abstract you are automatically registered). As stated before, the success of this event is a function of faculty participation and we discourage participation that is not faculty led.