Robert Brunner: Breaking Data Science

Breaking Data Science: We live in an increasingly digital world, where an ever-growing quantity of information is generated, collected, curated, archived, analyzed, and visualized. The transformation we are witnessing produces new opportunities across many seemingly unrelated academic fields, leading to the development and growth of a new field: data science. In this lecture, I will briefly discuss this new field before reviewing my personal transformation into a data scientist, which has included new work with probabilistic semantic graphs, text analytics with the Cline Center, an Internet of Things project with NCSA, and consultations with companies in the Research Park. I will conclude with a discussion on what I feel the University of Illinois can and should do to build a data science program that will position us as international leaders in this new field.

Bio: Robert J. Brunner is a professor of astronomy at Illinois with additional appointments in Informatics, Physics, Statistics, the Beckman Institute, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Robert received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He spent five years as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology before accepting his faculty appointment at Illinois. Professor Brunner is now focused on the nascent field of data science and is leading new educational opportunities in data science as well as working as the data science expert in residence at the University of Illinois Research Park.