New MIT research center to tackle big data

Chronicle of Higher Education : This week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced a research initiative to handle the complex and ever-growing amounts of data that are being collected. Called bigdata@CSAIL, the initiative will bring together computer experts and academic, industrial, and government leaders to work on techniques for capturing, processing, and sharing data, according to a press release . “With the right tools, we can begin to make sense of the data and use it to solve any number of pressing societal problemsâmdash;but our existing tools are outdated and rooted in computer systems and technologies developed in the 1970s,” said Sam Madden, head of the initiative. In addition, Intel Corp is establishing the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data at CSAIL, toward which it will contribute $2.5 million per year for up to five years.