A data science revolution

I predict in our near future every important decision mankind makes will be informed by a cognitive system and our lives and the world will actually be better off for it. The importance of data science to Northwestern is actually visible in many ways. This is really an exciting time to be at Northwestern in this area.

It’s actually in the kind of engineering and the applications of data science that we’re beginning to understand part of what makes us human. Many places are struggling with this large data set of electronic medical records, but having the ability to actually go in the records and extract that useful information through natural language processing is something we can uniquely do at Northwestern.

Everybody realizes how important data science is going to be to the future. I think that everybody from the board of trustees level all the way to undergraduate students. The collaborative nature of things at Northwestern is what is enabling all these transformations and making us all feel like something good is going to happen.

Here we are, this is Quest, the main high performance computing facility at Northwestern which in the last 5-6 years has actually transformed and changed the game for computational research in science and engineering at Northwestern. What we do here at Northwestern as part of the LIGO collaboration is actually all focused on data analysis

and simulations. It's been very important for us to have access to this computing class and be able to have the biggest stimulations that we can in order to understand the binary black holes that LIGO was looking for.

Northwestern is leading the way in the Chicago area and actually nationally in terms of trying to aggregate data about patients from the electronic health records. You can look at information on millions of hospitalization and millions of different individuals and these will enable you to start asking important health related questions. So across the country there have been a couple of large scale efforts towards looking at