Big news for the University of Washington: UW, along with NYU and Berkeley, has been given 5-year, $37.8M award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to advance the growth of data-intensive discovery across a broad range of fields. It's a huge, cross-institutional and multi-disciplinary effort that will build and explore new data science challenges and environments.
The UW team includes more than a dozen faculty, and is led by Ed Lazowska, Director of the UW eScience Institute. Berkeley's team is led by Saul Perlmutter and NYW's by Yann LeCun.
Fernando Perez from Berkeley has written a good description of his hopes for the project, what he thinks it means and what he thinks it might help solve (hint: it involves more than just data science).
