Our Purpose

Center Mission

This new Center aims to unify programs and curricula in data science with an initial emphasis on questions grounded in data that are generated by human activity, including computational social science (e.g., sociology and government), the economics/computer science interface, the aspects of digital agriculture in the production and management of agriculture, digital platforms supporting urban infrastructure (e.g., the sharing economy), and as a theme that is cross-cutting in many of these areas, the corresponding issues of privacy, security, and fairness; more generally, the Center will enhance other programmatic areas associated with data science in an entrepreneurial and opportunistic fashion.

Our Capacity to Help Government
and Industry

The areas spanned by the Center capture trends in data science for which there is tremendous current Cornell strength; leveraging this, the Center should play a leading role in

• Coordinating faculty renewal (especially cross-unit hires, focusing on tenured appointments in Statistics and Data Sciences (SDS), Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), Information Science (IS), Computer Science (CS), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Economics, and Mathematics);
• Administering a Research Assistant Professorship program;
• Coordinating internal proposal-driven thematic boot camps (off-term);
• Coordinating and playing a lead role in responding to inter- and intra-institutional external funding opportunities (e.g., the multi-institution TRIPODS NSF Data Science Institute, and outreach to foundations such as the Simons Foundation);
• Coordinating the engagement of industrial and government partners in data science;
• Coordinating the development of a Ph.D. field of Data Science, initially focusing on a Ph.D. minor;
• Coordinating with Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) to address issues of data archiving and research computing;
• Interfacing with the data-infused aspects of other radical collaborations (primarily digital agriculture, genome biology, sustainability, and infection biology).