I predict in our near future every important
decision mankind makes will be informed by
a cognitive system and our lives and the world
will actually be better off for it.
The importance of data science to Northwestern
is actually visible in many ways. This is
really an exciting time to be at Northwestern
in this area.
It’s actually in the kind of engineering
and the applications of data science that
we’re beginning to understand part of what
makes us human.
Many places are struggling with this large
data set of electronic medical records, but
having the ability to actually go in the records
and extract that useful information through
natural language processing is something we
can uniquely do at Northwestern.
Everybody realizes how important data science
is going to be to the future. I think that
everybody from the board of trustees level
all the way to undergraduate students. The
collaborative nature of things at Northwestern
is what is enabling all these transformations
and making us all feel like something good
is going to happen.
Here we are, this is Quest, the main high
performance computing facility at Northwestern
which in the last 5-6 years has actually transformed
and changed the game for computational research
in science and engineering at Northwestern.
What we do here at Northwestern as part of
the LIGO collaboration  is actually all focused on data analysis
and simulations. It's been very important
for us to have access to this computing class
and be able to have the biggest stimulations
that we can in order to understand the binary
black holes that LIGO was looking for.
Northwestern is leading the way in the Chicago
area and actually nationally in terms of trying
to aggregate data about patients from the
electronic health records. You can look at
information on millions of hospitalization
and millions of different individuals and
these will enable you to start asking important
health related questions.
So across the country there have been a couple
of large scale efforts towards looking at
genetic information, across individuals and populations. But what Northwestern
can really bring to that is a really unique
combination of large amounts of patient material
and information and large amounts of genetic
capabilities as well as combining that with
some high performance computing. And we think
this combination will really allow us to advance
data science so that we can make this information
meaningful in the lives of many people including
the people who come to Northwestern for care.
Data science is going to affect pretty much
every discipline. Technology is making available
to scholars much more information than they
used to have and that will require them to
learn new approaches and new techniques to
take advantage of that. And if they don't
they will fall behind and our approach at
Northwestern is to enable scholars from different
disciplines to make that jump.
I think this is all very exciting for the
humanities. These machines are actually bringing
us back together. If you just take something
like cognitive science right here at Northwestern
University, the faculty in this program, they’re
in the Weinberg but they’re also in the
engineering school. And that’s very significant
because here you have a program of study that
is using computational modeling, using machines,
trying to think about how machines process
information to understand to study the way
human brains process information. They’re
doing that together.
In other words, I think this is one clear
example of how all of the dividing of knowledge
that we have been doing over the past couple
of hundred years is actually getting undone
and coming back together and bringing us a
renewed appreciation for a unified approach
to trying to understand what it is that we
are doing when we are experiencing our humanity.
One of the papers that I feel the most proud
of is a study with Brian Uzzi who is a sociologist
at Kellogg.
As a sociologist, one of the things that I
study is human creativity. The thing that
Luis and I worked on were the teams that make
up Broadway musicals. And we worked combinations
of actors and creative artist wind up producing
the best Broadway musicals. Some human creativity
comes from people who are born as geniuses
of creativity but most human creativity is
really an import/export business of ideas.
You take ideas that are well known in one
area and you bring them over to a new area
where they are suddenly seen as invention.
So one of the great things about collaborating
with people who are outside your point of
view or your discipline is they have ideas
that work really well in their area where
you can bring them into your area and suddenly
you have invention.
Northwestern in a leader in this new area
of material genomics. This is an area in which
data science is coming in and hopefully will
transform the field. And this is wonderful
because it is actually connecting two areas
of strength at Northwestern. So material science
engineering is an area in which we are top
in the world and now we are starting to move
in this direction and there is a new institute,
CHIMaD, that is placing us at the top of the
pile in this area.
We use this software so we can predict new
materials that can be used in future industry
applications such as aircraft landing gear
steels or automobile high strength steels.
Northwestern as a university is trying to
get these potentially brilliant kids that
are very smart but we now we have to kind
of open them up. If they open up, they can
be more creative and find different, unusual
collaborators that maybe will spark a discovery.
One of the collaborative activities that was
the most fun was a collaboration called Data
As Art. and it was a collaboration between
engineers and faculty at the Art Institute.
And groups of students that came from both
Northwestern and from the School of the Art Institute
talked about ways in which you could visualize
that data to communicate in sight and it was
just the coolest thing ever. And this is the
kind of thing that collaboration enables.
