REU Site: REUMass: A Summer Computing Research Experience in Data Science

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Title: REU Site: REUMass: A Summer Computing Research Experience in Data Science This project provides undergraduate students with a 10-week intensive summer research experience focused on data science, an emerging area with high societal impact and significant student interest. Data science studies theory and methods that enable efficient extraction of knowledge from large amounts of data. The intellectual merits of this project include the investigation and development of new methods for data analysis, methods for improving the infrastructure for analysis, and the application of those analysis methods and infrastructure to useful problems. The project's broader significance and importance include increasing the attractiveness of graduate study in computer science for students from community colleges and underrepresented groups, and increasing the technical knowledge of data science among such students. Each student project is oriented around a single type of analysis method, infrastructure, or application, but projects embed that work within an integrated "deep stack" view of data science that connects applications with analytics and infrastructure. Students participate in a number of technical activities (workshops, symposia, field trips, etc.) and social events that have proven successful in creating a close and sustained relationship among the participants in past year's cohorts. This focus helps emphasize how fundamental computer science enables a broad set of information technology applications as well as showing the breadth of opportunities in computer science, and these areas have proven to be attractive to the proposal's target cohorts.