1. Walt Johnson
Director, Rochester Center of Excellence in Data Science

2. Rochester Center of Excellence in Data Science
Research to generate innovative technologies and methods; Commercialization & Incubation to drive growth of new products and services with access to business acceleration programs; Consultations & Resources to facilitate access to advanced computing and data visualization facilities, resources, and expertise
Key Strengths: Predictive Health Analytics, Optics & Imaging Analytics, Advanced wireless communications and network cartography, Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Robotic Motion Planning, Regional Training & Education, Methods, Tools and Infrastructure (including parallel computing, data forensics, and integrated circuit design)
Target Industries: Military, Aerospace, Government, Retail Food/Supermarkets, Automotive, Medical Device & Imaging, Agriculture/Weather Sensing, Marketing & Communications, College Athletics, Pharmaceutical and Biotech

3. Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation is a partnership between the University and IBM to create one of the most advanced computer networks dedicated to health research. VISTA Collaboratory facilitates the visualization and collaborative exploration of large and complex datasets with a dedicated link to the University’s supercomputing infrastructure along with other technological resources. IBM Blue Gene/Q holds the potential to open new doors of inquiry by allowing scientists to sift through and analyze huge volumes of data and create complex models and simulations that would previously not have been possible. BlueHive is the University’s primary Linux cluster for running demanding computations and offers almost two petabytes of configurable raw disk within a parallel file system.

4. Wegmans Hall is a new 60,000 square foot building that is home to the University’s Goergen Institute for Data Science and the Center of Excellence in Data Science. The University is helping meet workforce and industry demands with undergraduate and graduate degree programs in data science. Last month, New York State increased its investment in data science at the University of Rochester to $22.5 million, part of which will fund the newly established Rochester Data Science Consortium—a partnership between the University and Harris Corp. The data science and supercomputing capabilities at the University have helped generate more than $839 million in research funding since 2008.

5. Organization: New York State Office of the Attorney General
Project: Social Media as Sensors (2016)
Deliverables: Investigate the feasibility of using social multimedia analytics to detect illicit drug use and dealing. Transfer code to OAG if the performance of the automatic system is satisfactory.
Results: A detection accuracy of 90% compared to human experts has been achieved. A joint publication – Tracking Illicit Drug Dealing and Abuse on Instagram Using Multimodal Analysis – was accepted by the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology and published in July 2017.