Education
DATA SCIENCES SUMMER INSTITUTE: 5/14/07 - 7/11/07
The Data Sciences Summer Institute is an eight-week comprehensive education program designed to give students and faculty from a great variety of backgrounds and experiences an immersive experience in the study and practice of knowledge discovery. Participants will be advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty, with a focus on those from minority-serving institutions and EPSCoR states. Our program specifically aims to attract those whose talents or research interests fall into one of the following broad technical fields of information science:
- Databases and Information Integration
- Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction
- Computer Vision
- Information Retrieval and Web Information Access
- Machine Learning and Data Mining
The purpose of the Institute is three-fold: It provides specific and substantive training for the next generation of experts in the field, it serves as a tool for recruiting an experienced group of undergraduates into graduate study in one of the broad fields of information science, and finally, it is an intellectual community center, where participants at all levels of expertise come together in an enriched environment of collaboration and discovery.
Summer Program:
The summer institute weaves together mathematical foundations, applications, and research via three coordinated activities:
- an intensive course in the mathematical foundations of information science,
- a series of tutorials, each of which gives practical experience in a specific broad field of knowledge discovery, and
- a substantial group research project.
The summer program consists of a four-week training session and a four-week research session. The mathematical foundations course occupies approximately three hours every day of the training for a total of sixty instructional hours—roughly the equivalent of a four-credit course. (In fact, UIUC credit will be offered for the course.) The balance of the training session will be divided between tutorials and preliminary research. Each tutorial will require ten to fifteen hours of instruction, and it is expected that students will enroll in at most two during the training period, and three over the course of the summer. Students and faculty involved in the program will be in-residence at UIUC for the duration of the program.
Registration
The application process for the 2007 Data Sciences Summer Institute is now closed. Information on the 2008 Data Sciences Summer Institute will be available approximately in November 2007. Thank you for your interest.
An approximate timeline of events:
| Week of: | |
| 5/15 - 5/18 | Foundations Course (FC) week 1, Kick-off events, Research preliminaries |
| 5/21 - 5/25 | FC week 2, Tutorial 1, Speaker series guest |
| 5/28 - 6/1 | FC week 3, Tutorial 2 (Memorial Day holiday, 5/28) |
| 6/4 - 6/8 | FC week 4, Tutorial 3, Speaker series guest |
| 6/11 - 6/15 | Research |
| 6/18 - 6/22 | Research, Tutorial 4, Speaker series guest |
| 6/25 - 6/29 | Research, Tutorial 5 |
| 7/2 - 7/6 | Research, Speaker series guest (July 4 holiday, 7/4) |
| 7/9 - 7/11 | Research wrap-up, presentations, celebrations |
