As a partner institution, Bryn Mawr will receive between $150-180,000 each year for the next five years. The funds will be used to support undergraduate fellowships, faculty and student research, and on-campus programming.
Professor of Computer Science Deepak Kumar spearheads Bryn Mawr’s involvement with the Center. Bryn Mawr is assisting center researchers to create new courses and educational materials that introduce the emerging field of Science of Information to students (e.g. Science of Information, Data Science, etc.). The Center supports several Bryn Mawr students each year as undergraduate fellows, who work on research projects involving explorations of small and large datasets. The Center also provides generous travel support for students to participate in workshops, summer schools, and conferences. Kumar sits on the executive board of the Center and is also the center’s Associate Director for Education and Diversity, coordinating overall educational, diversity, and outreach activities.
The Center is headquartered at Purdue University. Other partner institutions are: Howard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Stanford University; Texas A&M University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Co-principal investigators are Peter Shor of MIT, Sergio Verdu of Princeton, Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford, and Bin Yu of UC Berkeley.
The Center's focus is on the extension of classical information theory, which led to basic technologies underlying digital communications — paving the way for the Internet, mobile devices and the Internet of Things — to meet the new challenges posed by the rapid expansion in the amount and complexity of available data. The Center's advances over the past five years are leading to technological solutions and tools for analysis and modeling for the life sciences, communications, financial transactions, and consumer behavior patterns.
Moving forward, the Center will focus on multimodal data or data that is a mix of multiple types of data structures
The NSF awarded $25 million in 2010 to establish the center.