The National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program recently selected Rutgers, New Brunswick to be part of a new multi-university Center on Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA). CARTA will “deliver efficient and practical solutions to hard problems in Data Analytics” that organizations and companies can leverage to create stronger infrastructure, based on next-generation computing hardware. UMBC is the lead site of this IUCRC, and is working with partners at North Carolina State University; Rutgers University, Newark; Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and Tel Aviv University. Two affiliated sites at University of California, San Diego, and University of Utah will also participate in the collaboration. IUCRCs are long-term partnerships among universities, industry and government that leverage an investment from NSF to catalyze primary support from the public and private sectors. The five-year NSF award to establish CARTA at the four institutions will be for $3 Million, and Rutgers portion is $750K. The NSF support for CARTA initiatives is expected to be multiplied several-fold by memberships and direct project support provided from the private and public sector.
Through CARTA, Rutgers, New Brunswick faculty and students will work on projects tackling concerns of national and global significance. One of the initial projects will integrate massive clinical data sets using machine learning to improve our understanding of cardiac disease and lung cancer and impact patient prognosis and outcomes. Another project will focus on cloud data privacy and protection, developing policy-based, semantically-rich approaches that can better ensure that approved users can safely access the data they need, including effectively tracking the provenance of data.
Dimitris Metaxas, a distinguished professor of computer science, will serve as CARTA Rutgers, New Brunswick site director and is a co-principal investigator on the grant. Metaxas will work with Rutgers faculty, and related Centers as well as the other site directors at the affiliated CARTA institutions.
CARTA will build upon the success of Rutgers Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA), which was originally established in 2010 to address productivity, performance and scalability issues due to the ever increasing amounts of industry-related data. The new center will expand the scope of the research conducted on scalable algorithms, methods and solutions, while continuing the IUCRC’s mission to grow strong partnerships among academic institutions and corporations.
CARTA will usher in the era of accelerated real-time analytics by effectively developing and applying innovative technologies such as AI, machine learning, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing to address our nation’s global competitive challenges in healthcare, autonomy, robotics, entertainment systems, smart cities and security.
The combined talent among students and faculty from seven institutions and their industry and government agencies partners, have the potential to enable new knowledge discovery and dramatically impact new data-intensive technologies.
