Small Data Research Infrastructure: Workshop Proposal

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Small Data Research Infrastructure: Workshop Proposal This project is for a workshop series to assess the research needs and opportunities in small data research. Small data refers to the collection of digital traces that individuals generate implicitly and explicitly during their everyday lives. As the use of big data analytics has exploded, a growing community of computer and information science researchers has started to focus on the capture, processing, governance, and use of these small data streams. The research challenges raised by small data cut across the computer science community and include: 1) Personal data mining and modeling: parsing and fusion of diverse and noisy data streams to create informative, descriptive, and predictive models of individuals and their behaviors; 2) Data Privacy and sharing: constructs, architecture, and policies, for protecting and sharing raw and derived personal data streams; and 3) User-centered applications and human-computer interaction: design methods and tools to create meaningful and engaging experiences for individuals. In order to make progress across these three research thrusts, at a scale and pace that matches the potential for impact to individuals and society, this project aims to run a series of workshops to convene the technical community. The output of the workshop series will include the articulation of a small data research agenda, and a plan for a shared community research infrastructure to support real world experiments with real participants and their small data streams. This project brings together expertise from across computer and information sciences and engineering for a series of workshops to develop a research agenda and community infrastructure for small data research. To develop and evaluate realistic systems using "small data" requires user involvement and an end-to-end system test bed involving data streams controlled by various companies and further, that such a test bed should be a shared community infrastructure, since no single research group can afford to build it. The infrastructure development at the center of the proposed workshops has the potential to change how investigators do research, which broadly impacts the research community.