UL Lafayette’s Big Data Research Center Hosts International Conference

(LAFAYETTE, LA, November 15, 2016) The University of Louisiana at Lafayette hosted the National Science Foundation Center for Visual and Decision Informatics’ (CVDI) Fall Industry Advisory Board Meeting from October 31 to November 2. The center partners with industry and government to conduct research in data science to develop solutions that unleash the transformative potential of Big Data. Established in 2012, the center is an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) that taps university researchers and students from UL Lafayette, Drexel University and Tampere University of Technology in Finland to team up with 13 industry partners to solve Big Data challenges.

At the meeting, Professor Peter Beling from the University of Virginia gave the keynote address on Big Data for the Internet of Things. Speakers from the industry who offered their perspectives on the Internet of Things and Big Data included Richard Bissonette, Senior Vice President at CGI, Steven Greenspan, Vice President of CA Technologies and Matti Vakkuri, Big Data Director at Tieto.

CVDI received more than $5.1 million in funding since 2012 from industry members, the National Science Foundation and Tekes, a Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. In its first four years, CVDI completed 25 research projects that developed next-generation technologies that help industry members improve the process of analyzing and interpreting large volumes of data.

“The rapid growth of CVDI is directly impacted by the level of commitment of the partner universities and industry members to collaborate on the research projects,” said Vijay Raghavan, CVDI Director and Alfred and Helen Lamson Endowed Professor, UL Lafayette. The center will advance to Phase II of the NSF program in 2017 marked by a number of noteworthy accomplishments. “In particular, CVDI is proud to announce our industry members nominated two projects as technological breakthroughs to the National Science Foundation – Schumacher  Clinical Partners nominated the flu forecasting model by Dr. Raju Gottumukkala, and CGI nominated the innovative hotspot prediction technique by Dr. Jian Chen,” noted Vijay Raghavan.

CVDI is the only National Science Foundation center in the state of Louisiana and is the only NSF I/UCRC with a primary focus on the theme of data science, big data analytics and visual analytics.

CVDI is poised to move to Phase II soon and is expected more than double in size, in the next couple of years, with the addition of four domestic academic research sites – the University of Virginia, Stony Brook University, Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte- and one international research site- Amrita University.