Jeannette Wing, Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia, discussed the Institute’s many emerging and exciting initiatives during a recent Town Hall talk. She also detailed the ways in which university members can partner with the Institute, especially on multi-disciplinary research projects.
Her talk focused on the institute’s mission, which is to advance the state-of-the-art in data science; to transform all fields through the application of data science; and to ensure the responsible use of data for the good of society. Her live-streamed lecture was followed by Q&A session with the institute’s leadership team
“We are all generating more and more data every day and it’s my aspiration to foster more multidisciplinary across all the schools at Columbia to analyze that data,” said Wing. “Data science is the science of extracting value from data and I want Columbia to be the world leader in data science. And the key to achieving that goal is through research that we can all work on together.”
Wing is prominent in the tech field, with wide experience in academia, government and business. She came to DSI from Microsoft, where for four years she was Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, overseeing the company’s global network of research labs.
She is renowned for her intellectual leadership, especially for helping to shape data science into a discipline essential to scholarly discovery and productive invention. Her areas of research expertise include security and privacy, formal methods, programming languages and distributed and concurrent systems. Her seminal essay, “Computational Thinking,” was published more than a decade ago and is still credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in an array of fields.
— Robert Florida