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     COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER
AND THE SCHOOL OF PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, & COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES
                            (CSI 898-Sec 001)
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  Big Data: The future of research and education is here

                         Kirk Borne
 School of Physics, Astronomy & Computational Sciences, 
          George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

The volume of data has grown to the point that politicians,
educators, business people, scientists, social media specialists,
and countless others are paying attention to this exponential
flood of information.  It is indeed exponential since the data
growth rate is proportional to the existing data volume,
with a doubling time of approximately one year in many contexts.
The explosion of interest in the topic is saturating the 
discussion in all data-intensive domains.  The challenges
associated with Big Data are technological, algorithmic,
and sociological.  I will address the fundamental challenges
that Big Data pose to scientific research and education.
An informatics approach to scientific research includes
a variety of data science disciplines, including 
statistics, machine learning, data mining, data modeling,
data indexing and search, and more.  Accordingly, science
education must evolve to incorporate these methods and
algorithms within traditional graduate training programs.
But that is only a partial solution - informatics training
must be pushed down to undergraduate education, and lower.
I will describe some concepts and approaches to this 
revolution in scientific research and education,
with examples from astronomy and other disciplines.

                       October 22, 2012
                               4:30 pm
                    Room 301, Research I, Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminars.htm