The University of Pennsylvania is taking part in the newly established National Science Foundation Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.

Massive datasets and novel computational techniques are changing how individuals and societies approach day-to-day tasks. Data analytics promise to deliver individually tailored treatment to medical patients, massively reduce energy use in buildings and radically improve teaching methods in schools, among other advances.

To direct interdisciplinary attention at these problems, the National Science Foundation has established four Big Data Innovation Hubs — Midwest, Northeast, South and West — fostering regional collaborations between researchers from academia, government and industry.

The Northeast Hub will focus on Finance, Health, Energy, Cities and Regions, Big Data in Education and Discovery Science. Each area will address education, data sharing, ethics and policy and privacy and security.

Michael Kearns will lead the Finance “spoke” of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub. He is the director of The Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences and National Center Professor of Management & Technology in the Department of Computer and Information Science in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

This collaboration will apply data analytics to increasingly automated financial markets to understand their underlying connections and vulnerabilities.

“Since the 2008 financial crisis,” Kearns said, “multiple research communities have become interested in understanding systemic risks by looking at financial markets as networks, with banks or hedge funds as nodes and investments in one another as edges. If one of these nodes fails and goes bankrupt, it changes the financial state of the other nodes that are connected by the edges. It’s a cascading effect.”

Kearns expects he and other Warren Center members will begin collaborative research projects on topics in this area once funding begins next year.   

The Warren Center for Data and Network Sciences is an incubator of forward-thinking research, culturally impactful innovation, and potent interdisciplinary collaboration that challenges how the world views technology. Serving as a complement to the Penn Engineering undergraduate program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering, it provides funding in the form of graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, connects faculty and students from different disciplines and brings in outside experts to advance research in this cutting-edge field. 

Penn Medicine’s Institute for Biomedical Informatics, led by Jason H. Moore will serve as a member of the Hub’s Health spoke. That arm of the consortium, which includes more than 20 universities, will analyze patient and biological data at scale and examine ways of harnessing data from social media, environmental sensors and other alternative sources to deliver individualized treatment to patients.

Established in 2013, Penn Medicine’s IBI provides an interdisciplinary home for Penn faculty, staff and students who work in the broad field of bioinformatics. Big data is increasingly driving both biological research and clinical care. In biomedicine, this information ranges from bioinformatics at the genome and molecular level to health care informatics at the clinical level to public-health informatics at the population level. In partnership with the schools of Engineering and Applied Science, Arts & Sciences, Nursing and Veterinary Medicine, as well as The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the IBI tackles challenges directly relevant to patient care, as well as to improving basic research that leads to more personalized care.

The Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, led by Columbia University, is a $1.25 million research project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to share data, tools and ideas for tackling challenges facing the northeastern United States. One of four NSF innovation hubs, it includes 40 universities and partners in industry, government and the non-profit sector from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The NSF’s National Big Data Research and Development Initiative aims to solve some of the nation’s most pressing R&D challenges related to extracting knowledge and insights from large, complex collections of digital data.