HDR TRIPODS: Building the Foundation for a Data-Intensive Studies Center-

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Tufts University is launching the T-TRIPODS institute, that will focus an interdisciplinary effort across multiple departments and campuses to advance the understanding of foundations of data science. The project seeks to support the first three years of the operation of the institute, and will support a culture of interdisciplinary research and learning in data sciences across multiple departments, fostering collaboration between mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers, as well as with scientists and scholars in a wide range of application domains. The model is built around overlapping three-year focused research topics, with an offset timeline, so that each year, the oldest research topic sunsets while a new research topic is added. For each focused research topic, the project will convene interdisciplinary teams of mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians and electrical engineers to address timely questions and solve important problems on the frontiers of data science. Complementing and completing the research effort are teaching and curriculum development efforts for data science at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. Furthermore, the structure of T-TRIPODS will foster specific and deep connections with application domain experts in several areas, leading to translational research. T-TRIPODS is strongly committed to Data Science for All, and will partner closely with the Tufts Center for STEM Diversity to broaden participation in undergraduate research opportunities in data science at Tufts.T-TRIPODS will address three research thrusts. Research Focus I (Graphs and Tensor Representations of Data) in the first year, which will be joined by Focus II (Collecting, Modeling, and Learning from Data with a Spatial or Temporal Dimension) in the second year, and Focus III (Data Guarantees: Analysis of Data with Assurances of Quality, Transparency, Fairness, Privacy, and Trust) in year three, which will bring the institute up to full capacity with three research foci running simultaneously. All research foci will include cross-disciplinary training of graduate students; workshops that bring together experts and early career scientists from math, computer science, and electrical engineering; training modules in application-specific concerns around ethical safeguards for data usage and analysis; and an Ideas Lab activity to connect researchers from the core research topics to domain experts in four identified broad application areas: 1) Biological and Biomedical data, 2) Education and Cognitive Science, 3) Smart Cities, Development, and Design and 4) Computational Arts and Humanities (including Language and Music). T-TRIPODS will be integrated within Tufts' new Data Intensive Science Center (DISC) and will synergize with and enhance existing Tufts University degree programs in Data Science.This project is part of the National Science Foundation's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea activity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.