Big Data sessions bring variety of opinions
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Big Data sessions bring variety of opinions
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uilding from a series of features published in MRS Bulletin and Materials360® Online, the Materials Research Society (MRS) sought to expand community dialogue on “Big and Open Data for Materials Research” through a panel of experts and diverse perspectives at a lecture (Symposium X session) at the 2013 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. Big Data and open data are topics of increasing interest and discussion in the materials community and beyond. Advances in computational modeling as well as experimental output are introducing a shift in how research is conducted and how data are analyzed and shared. Broad access to data holds the promise of advancing the speed to new discoveries. However, this also raises questions relating to quality, validation, and reproducibility of data, and intellectual property issues. In the session, Tia Benson Tolle of The Boeing Company and current MRS President, served as moderator. She asked if Big Data is critical to materials research and advances. “Materials science has existed and accelerated without big data,” said Mary Galvin of the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research, one of the panelists. “The critical part is the cultural shift that has to occur. We must integrate data mining, theory, and computation with experimentation, which is the real key and where we can begin to accelerate materials science. The infrastructure of creating the database is just one component of that.” Another comment was that capabilities are needed to combine data from different sources, experiments, and times, and, in many cases, that is going to involve the merging of several data sets that have complementary information. “We need to ensure that can be done seamlessly and with appropriate statistics so we can extract the maximum scientific value out of the experiments,” said panelist J. Michael Simonson of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 39 • APRIL 2014
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“We are starting into the data extensive research cycle. It doesn’t mean that theory, experiments, and computation aren’t relevant. But data-intensive science combined with these mechanisms of exploration are really going to change the scientific method,” said Jim Pinkleman of Microsoft Research. “Big data today will be small data 10 years from now. Big Data will absolutely change science, whether we decide for it to happen or not.” The open data policy memorandum issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last year has had mixed reactions. Some see the policy as a threat, others as an opportunity. Nicola Marzari of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, is in favor of the open source movement. “By making tools publicly available, you empower scientific communities all over the world. This will significantly change the panorama in the next decades.” It can help to verify information by having members of the community discover if data or tools are correct. It also allows reproducibility and empowers other researchers to b
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