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FAU gets $600,000 to create Big Data lab [Sun Sentinel]
[September 22, 2014]

FAU gets $600,000 to create Big Data lab [Sun Sentinel]


(South Florida Sun Sentinel (FL) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 22--Florida Atlantic University is looking to step into the big leagues of Big Data.

The National Science Foundation awarded FAU $600,000 to create a Big Data Training and Research Lab on its Boca Raton campus. The new lab will allow FAU to do work it needs to do but simply isn't possible in its current data-mining lab.



"I was extremely happy when I heard," said Taghi Khoshgoftaar, the computer science professor who received the grant. "If you're doing data analytics and you don't have the computer resources, you are really handicapped." Big Data refers to the collection of incredibly vast amounts of information -- so much that traditional data-processing programs can't handle it all. Instead, the data sets require supercomputers with blazing processing speeds and terabyte after terabyte of storage capacity. A terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes.

"We will go over 1,000 terabytes, for sure," Khoshgoftaar said.


Because the technology is so new, few of these Big Data labs exist across the country and Khoshgoftaar said it was "very competitive" to get the grant.

The grant money, along with another $297,000 kicked in by the university, will be used to upgrade the computer systems in FAU's current Data Mining lab. But it will be four or five months before the upgrades are in place.

"First quarter of 2015, we will have things running," Khoshgoftaar said. "But not all the money will be spent then. It's a three-year grant, and this technology is always changing." The applications of the Big Data lab are almost limitless -- anything we do generates data. As part of the grant, the new lab will have to offer courses on data analytics and conduct research on "complex bioinformatics analysis, machine condition monitoring, underwater acoustics and signal processing, video encoding, streaming data and climate modeling." The lab is already working on a few projects that the new upgrades will allow it to complete, one of which falls under bioinformatics analysis.

"Here in our research park, there is a startup company -- well, it was a startup company three or four years ago, they have 250 or 300 employees now -- called Modernizing Medicine. They have over 16 million patient records. So, what is the knowledge discovery?" Khoshgoftaar asks rhetorically. "Look at these records, say, look at cancer -- skin cancer or some other -- and these 16 million people are in different parts of the country. They're going to different doctors and getting different treatments. We can analyze all of this to find out which patients improve better than others, so we can find out what treatments really work and which doctors are most effective." [email protected], 954-356-4605 or Twitter @Daniel_Sweeney ___ (c)2014 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at www.sun-sentinel.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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