2017 NYSTAR Annual Meeting

Walt Johnson
Director, Rochester Center of
Excellence in Data Science
 2017 NYSTAR Annual Meeting

Rochester Center of Excellence in

Data Science

Profile
Key services
Research to generate innovative technologies and methods; Commercialization & Incubation to drive growth of
new products and services with access to business acceleration programs; Consultations & Resources to
facilitate access to advanced computing and data visualization facilities, resources, and expertise

Key Capabilities & Industries Served

Key Strengths: Predictive Health Analytics, Optics & Imaging Analytics, Advanced wireless communications and
network cartography, Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Robotic Motion Planning, Regional Training & Education,
Methods, Tools and Infrastructure (including parallel computing, data forensics, and integrated circuit design)
Target Industries: Military, Aerospace, Government, Retail Food/Supermarkets, Automotive, Medical Device &
Imaging, Agriculture/Weather Sensing, Marketing & Communications, College Athletics, Pharmaceutical and
Biotech
 2017 NYSTAR Annual Meeting

Asset Highlights

Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation is a partnership between the

University and IBM to create one of the most advanced computer networks dedicated
to health research.
VISTA Collaboratory facilitates the visualization and collaborative exploration of large
and complex datasets with a dedicated link to the University’s supercomputing
infrastructure along with other technological resources.
IBM Blue Gene/Q holds the potential to open new doors of inquiry by allowing
scientists to sift through and analyze huge volumes of data and create complex models
and simulations that would previously not have been possible.
BlueHive is the University’s primary Linux cluster for running demanding computations
and offers almost two petabytes of configurable raw disk within a parallel file system.
 2017 NYSTAR Annual Meeting

Asset Highlights

Wegmans Hall is a new 60,000 square foot building that is home to the University’s
Goergen Institute for Data Science and the Center of Excellence in Data Science.
The University is helping meet workforce and industry demands with undergraduate
and graduate degree programs in data science.
Last month, New York State increased its investment in data science at the University
of Rochester to $22.5 million, part of which will fund the newly established Rochester
Data Science Consortium—a partnership between the University and Harris Corp.
The data science and supercomputing capabilities at the University have helped
generate more than $839 million in research funding since 2008.
 2017 NYSTAR Annual Meeting

Case Study

Organization: New York State Office of the Attorney General

Project: Social Media as Sensors (2016)
Deliverables: Investigate the feasibility of using social multimedia analytics to
detect illicit drug use and dealing. Transfer code to OAG if the performance of
the automatic system is satisfactory.
Results: A detection accuracy of 90% compared to human experts has been
achieved. A joint publication – Tracking Illicit Drug Dealing and Abuse on
Instagram Using Multimodal Analysis – was accepted by the ACM Transactions on
Intelligent Systems and Technology and published in July 2017.