Data Sciences

Our ever-growing ability to collect data has placed new pressures on our ability to make use of it.  Tomorrow's data-driven world will rely increasingly on methods and tools that can access, retrieve, and synthesize information from disparate sources and modalities.  New computational models, algorithmic approaches, and tools are required to understand natural language, images, and other sensory information as a means of human-machine communication.  Models must be developed to transform raw unstructured or semi-structured data — sensory data, images and text, into useful and understandable information that is easily accessible at the knowledge level, interpreted and integrated with other resources.

As home to unrivaled national assets in data intensive computing, Illinois has a long and distinguished history in data-intensive computing.  Illinois combines excellence and leadership in data systems, artificial intelligence, systems and networking, architecture and parallel computing, to pursue unprecedented applications in multi-modal intelligence information systems and data-intensive computing, and in new computing architectures to support a data-driven world.

Research at the University of Illinois aims to discover new computational and algorithmic principles and software systems that facilitate access to, understanding of, and transformation and synthesis of natural language, images, and other forms of semi-structured and unstructured data.
Illinois research is pioneering new directions in the field, combining science and computing, investigating new architectures, applications, and technologies, and testing the limits of petascale computing and beyond.

Research topics include:

• Database Systems
• Data Mining
• Information Integration
• Information Retrieval and Text Information Systems
• Natural Language Understanding
• Machine Learning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
• Web Search and Mining