“The New York Times turned its attention last weekend toward education of data scientists, highlighting a budding ‘rivalry’ between New York City and Seattle.
“The paper’s Education Life section focused on the relative merits of the two cities as big data hubs, and efforts to build curricula in this field at universities around the country. But what the coverage didn’t mention is that universities in New York and Seattle are also competing for a major grant aimed at broadening academic support for data-driven scientific discovery …
“In a few weeks, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will announce partner universities for a five-year effort to ‘dramatically accelerate data-driven research.’ The foundations plan to award grants totaling between $25 million and $40 million beginning later this year …
“Late last year, the foundations invited 15 elite universities—including the University of Washington, Columbia University, New York University, and Cornell University—to apply to the program …
“At the UW, this effort is centered on the eScience Institute. The goal ‘is to make UW a leader in inventing new approaches to data-driven discovery, and also in making these new approaches usable by researchers in a broad range of fields,’ says UW computer science professor Ed Lazowska, who leads the eScience Institute.”
Read more in Xconomy here.