On September 17, over 500 guests from across and beyond the U of T community gathered virtually to celebrate the launch of the University’s new Data Sciences Institute (DSI).
The DSI has been established to provide the leadership and capacity to catalyze the transformative nature of data sciences across all disciplines, in fair and ethical ways, and solve some of society’s most complex and pressing problems. The interdisciplinary field of data science uses and develops tools to extract knowledge from the world’s vast and increasing trove of data. The DSI will facilitate inclusive research connections, supporting foundational research in data science that arises in the context of applications, and supporting the training of a diverse group of highly qualified personnel for their success in interdisciplinary environments.
The DSI’s inaugural director is Lisa Strug, a professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Department of Computer Science, and senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. In her remarks at the launch, Strug noted that “new technologies in every facet of academic and daily life are producing increasingly large-scale complex data.”
This forward-thinking initiative is exactly what the world needs right now. Its impact will be felt in a wide range of areas that warrant critical discussion, and much-needed problem solving.
It is well known, for example, that health care, astrophysics, economics and climate science have all been revolutionized by the availability of large quantities of data; fields such as computational social sciences, digital humanities, urban informatics have arisen to address the challenge and opportunity these data bring. With increasing and more complex data comes “the challenge of collecting, manipulating, storing, visualizing and extracting information from the data, and doing so in reproducible, fair and ethical ways,” said Strug.
The launch was moderated by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Department of Mathematics, and featured a host of speakers. The first was Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation and strategic initiatives. He noted the DSI’s potential to push the boundaries of what can be learned in traditional fields.
Deans from all three University campuses attested to the role data science plays in achieving key institutional objectives. In particular, Dean Melanie Woodin of the Faculty of Arts & Science commended the DSI’s collaboration with hospitals and other partner institutes as an active example of “Leveraging our Strengths,” a priority identified in the Faculty’s strategic plan.
Speaker Jennifer Chayes remarked on the parallels between the DSI and the newly-established Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is associate provost. In her talk, Chayes — a mathematical physicist and computer scientist — stressed the importance of ethics in data science, and of educating the community to approach findings with a critical eye. “It’s hard to be a member of civil society without understanding data, and knowing how to question what are constantly presented to us as data-derived conclusions,” she said.
Statisticians and computer scientists have long used mathematics and computers as a tool to collect, visualize and interpret data. With the advent of the new data era, advances in statistical and machine learning are enabling data scientists to analyze data at a scale never before seen. The launch’s last two speakers, statistics professors Andrew Gelman (Columbia University) and Rob Tibshirani (Stanford University) hailed such advances, while addressing several key challenges in their field.
Tibshirani, for example, mentioned the reluctance of certain parties to share data, along with an unfortunately increasing mistrust of science. He also emphasized the particularly high bar for accuracy in his own specialty of biomedical data science.
The breadth of the DSI’s reach — and of the data revolution in general — is such that it stands to affect every Faculty and department of the University.
“This forward-thinking initiative is exactly what the world needs right now,” said Dean Woodin. “Its impact will be felt in a wide range of areas that warrant critical discussion, and much-needed problem solving.”
The Data Sciences Institute is a University of Toronto Institutional Strategic Initiative, funded by the University and its academic divisions, and external funding partners.