When All Science Becomes Data Science.doc

Data Deluge When All Science Becomes Data Science By? Vijaysree Venkatraman May 13, 2013 Learning how to clean up data, how to detect and deal with its inconsistencies, is a hands-on craft, just like learning to use equipment in a physical lab. —Greg Wilson Sarah Loebman, a graduate student at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, studies the Milky Way galaxy to find out how it arrived at its present structure. She works with two groups in the astronomy department there, one that surveys the night skies and another that runs high-resolution simulations. Both contend with huge volumes of data. Earlier in my career, I spent a good part of the day just loading data into my computer, she says. When a physics colleague won a NASA grant to explore how database technology could be used in astronomy, she collaborated with him and with faculty from the computer science department, to see what could be done with her unwieldy data sets. The first thing she did was sign up for a graduate-level class on database management systems. It changed the way she saw her work: Using a database shifted my focus to look beyond just one moment in time in a simulation, she says. Soon she was helping other colleagues deal with their data and streamline their work. Loebman, who in 2009 presented a paper called Analyzing Massive Astrophysical Datasets: Can Pig/Hadoop or a Relational DBMS Help? will now be heading to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for postdoctoral work. She believes she won the fellowship, from the Michigan Society of Fellows, on the strength of her interdisciplinary work. Courtesy of Sarah Loebman Sarah Loebman The coming deluge Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science Engineering at UW, believes that data-driven discovery will become the norm, as he?told?ScienceCareers in a recent interview. This new environment, he says, will create and reward researchers (like Loebman) who are well versed in both the methodologies of their