The University of Rochester and Cornell University jointly establish the Greater Data Science Cooperative Institute (GDSC). The GDSC is based on two founding tenets. The first is that enduring advances in data science require combining techniques and viewpoints across electrical engineering, mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science. The investigators’ goal is to forge a consensus perspective on data science that transcends any individual field. The second is that data-science research must be grounded in an application domain. This helps to ensure that assumptions about the availability and quality of data are realistic, and it allows methodological results to be tested experimentally as well as theoretically. As such, the GDSC aims to consider applications in medicine and healthcare, an important application domain and one for which advances in data science can have a direct, positive impact on society. The GDSC aims to tackle foundational questions that are motivated by problems in healthcare, obtain solutions that fuse domain expertise with application-agnostic methodologies, and ultimately yield scientific advances that impact the way healthcare is provided. The GDSC aims to leverage the physical proximity of the two institutions, and the unique strengths in each of the core disciplines above and in medicine.

This collaboration is part of the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea activity.