Data Science

The Institute will coordinate the coming transformation of Big Data Science at UZH. The distinguished statistician G. Jogesh Babu has an excellent commentary on Big Data in Astrophysics. The progression of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to the Large Scale Synoptic Telescope (LSST) was foreseen in a seminal White Paper, “The Digital Sky” by Lake, Szalay and Prince which lead to the conference “Virtual Observatories of the Future in 2000”. The next generation LSST will image the entire sky every few nights transforming sky surveys into the time domain. LSST will generate 30TB/night or 10PB/year. Prof. Moore and Dr. Stadel participated in a key technology project John’s Hopkins “Datascope Project” in 2012, moving 2.8PB of data from their Silver River simulation to this novel interactive environment. Currently, we have 1PB of spinning data from our simulations and this has a doubling time less than a year.

There will be increasing course offerings for students to help them with the knowledge and skills required to handle “Big Data” problems.

Drew Conway’s Venn diagram showing the skills required for Data Science.