Education
DATA SCIENCES SUMMER INSTITUTE
The Data Sciences Summer Institute is an eight-week comprehensive education program designed to give students and faculty from a great variety of backgrounds and experiences an immersive experience in the study and practice of knowledge discovery. Participants will be advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty, with a focus on those from minority-serving institutions and EPSCoR states. Our program specifically aims to attract those whose talents or research interests fall into one of the following broad technical fields of information science:
- Databases and Information Integration
- Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction
- Computer Vision
- Information Retrieval and Web Information Access
- Machine Learning and Data Mining
The purpose of the Institute is three-fold: It provides specific and substantive training for the next generation of experts in the field, it serves as a tool for recruiting an experienced group of undergraduates into graduate study in one of the broad fields of information science, and finally, it is an intellectual community center, where participants at all levels of expertise come together in an enriched environment of collaboration and discovery.
Summer Program:
The summer institute weaves together mathematical foundations, applications, and research via four coordinated activities:
- an intensive course in the mathematical foundations of information science,
- a set of tutorials, each of which gives practical experience in a specific broad field of knowledge discovery, and
- a speaker series of academic and industrial researchers from around the country, and
- a substantial group research project.
The summer program consists of a four-week training session and a four-week research session. The mathematical foundations course occupies approximately three hours every day of the training for a total of forty instructional hoursroughly the equivalent of a three-credit course. (In fact, UIUC credit is be offered for the course.) The balance of the training session is divided between tutorials and preliminary research. Each tutorial involves ten to fifteen hours of instruction, and it is expected that students will enroll in at most two during the training period, and three over the course of the summer. Guest speakers will attend the DSSI approximately weekly. A typical visit will consist of approximately 3 hours of lecture and a day of student and faculty consultation. Students and faculty participating in the program will be in-residence at UIUC for the duration of the program.
Apply to the Data Sciences Summer Institute
We are now accepting applications for the 2008 Data Sciences Summer Institute. Please Click here to go to the application form. Please provde all information requested in the application, including a personal statement. Please note your application credentials are subject to independent verification and you might be asked to provide additional information or documentation before a formal funding offer is made.
Additional Funding Opportunity for Students and Faculty from Minority Institutions
If you are a student or faculty member at a Minority Serving Institution, you may be eligible for a separate funding opportunity to attend our summer school. This funding comes from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Summer Team Program. You may learn more about this program and obtain an application at http://www.orau.gov/dhsfaculty. All qualified students and faculty from Minority Serving Institutions are encouraged to apply for this additional funding opportunity.
Past Programs
Tutorials, speaker slides, and other information from past summer programs is available online.
