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The University of Colorado Boulder and the Center for Software and Society is building a research initiative that investigates topics related to Big Data. Big Data is a new term for a combination of research fields that have been around for a long time: operating systems, distributed systems, distributed computing, software engineering, machine learning, data mining, information visualization, and others. The combination of techniques from these fields being applied to the problem of generating, collecting, managing, and analyzing large sets of data is receiving intense interest and exploration by both industry and academia.

Be sure to check out our News page for recent announcements and updates.

Big Data at CU

Here at CU Boulder, we have faculty with expertise in all of these domains and the Big Data Initiative of the Center for Software and Society is bringing them together to form new collaborations–among themselves, with other academic institutions, and with industry–to perform the next generation in research on topics related to data analysis and the design and development of data-intensive systems.

Research

We are investigating the following research problems:

• Algorithmic: How do we best process large data sets in parallel?
• Operational: How are these systems best installed, operated, and maintained?
• Architectural: How do we design software systems to best make use of big data technology?
• Human-centered: What apps and visualizations are needed to understand/analyze big data?
• Educational: How do we best train and educate students to work and do research in big data?
• Policy: What are the legal and privacy implications of the information that can be extracted from big data; including the location of citizens and their behavior on-line and in the real world?

These investigations will include work in data analysis via machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval, the design of low level operating systems for cluster computing, the design of software architectures for big data software systems, new distributed computing techniques to enable the storage and processing of large data sets, and the design of new user interaction paradigms for big data analytics.

Looking Forward

The Initiative is seeking investment from industry in various forms including gifts, sponsored research projects, and membership agreements. It aims to be a partner in the Big Data ecosystem that is developing in Colorado, the US, and world. It will be hosting forums in the future for members of academia and industry to come together to discuss techniques and technologies–as well as the latest research results–that are useful in the big data domain.