Objective
Since the late 20th century, an ever growing abundance of information became available to a rapidly growing population through the internet. It was no longer necessary to be tech savvy or to know what a relational database was in order to tap into this abundance: Millions of people started searching and connecting with friends on the web on a regular basis. This revolution is still causing significant social and economic changes, while evolving on two main tracks. The first track is the increase in storage, networking and processing power, harnessed in various physical configurations (data centers, handheld devices, personal computers and internet providers), making the same massive amounts of data appear virtually present simultaneously everywhere. The second force, complementing the first, is the algorithmic and statistical tools bridge between the people and the data.
It is widely understood today that the survival of popular online applications (search engines, social networks, ad networks) heavily depends on the ability to represent data (e.g. indexing, classification and storage) and serve it (e.g. as query results, ads and recommendations) efficiently and reliably. It is hence not surprising that huge efforts are invested in analysis of massive amounts of data and people. These efforts transcend traditional borders of computer science and reposition the field as an engine for emerging multidisciplinary research, very much the way bioinformatics emerged before.
We are already witnessing the economic and social influence of the internet on our lives, and the goal of this research is to identify simple structures that emerge in this ecosystem (graphs, clusters, high dimensional spaces, ratings, discrete choice and preference) and apply algorithmic tools to them.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
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Funding Scheme
MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)Coordinator
32000 Haifa
Israel