The Moore/Sloan Data Science Environments: Advancing Data-Intensive Discovery

This is the "context setting" talk in a session on advancing university career paths in interdisciplinary data-intensive discovery. The presenters in the session are participants in a 5-year, $37.8 million "Data Science Environments" collaboration funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at New York University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington.

We are at the dawn of a new age of data-intensive discovery that will dramatically impact all fields of science, and integrate them with the methodology fields of computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.

In this talk, I’ll begin by looking at my own field of computer science, then consider how  “smart discovery” is revolutionizing all fields.  I'll describe the goals of the Data Science Environments collaboration, and the mechanisms we are using in pursuit of those goals. I’ll end with comments on university culture and reward structures, and on the need to make institutions more integrated and inclusive.