by Angela Guess
A team of professors and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley has been awarded $10 million by the National Science Foundation to research Big Data solutions, Jeanne Carstensen reports. Carstensen writes, “The sheer size of [Big Data] combined with its complexity has threatened to overwhelm just about everybody, including the scientists who specialize in wrangling it. ‘It’s easier to collect data,’ said Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘and harder to make sense of it.’ Making sense of Big Data is, in fact, a holy grail of computer science these days — and technology companies, academic institutions and the federal government are investing heavily in the endeavor.”
She continues, “With Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other leading data-heavy technology companies based in the Bay Area, many locals are on the cutting edge of Big Data research. Last month, the National Science Foundation awarded $10 million to Berkeley’s A.M.P. Expedition, which stands for “algorithms machines people,” a team of Cal professors and graduate students who take an interdisciplinary approach in their drive to advance Big Data analysis. The group is working to build a new set of open source tools for the era of Big Data and is collaborating on cancer research with the University of California, San Francisco, and UrbanSim, an urban planning tool, among others.”
photo credit: Berkeley
