The George Washington University Mathematics and Statistics Training, Education, and Research (MASTER) program is designed to excite students about the mathematical questions and techniques underlying the computational challenges of analyzing large-scale data. The program will be run by the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, with support from faculty in Computer Science. Computational and Data-enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) has now emerged as a distinct intellectual and technological discipline lying at the intersection of applied mathematics, statistics, computer science, core science and engineering disciplines. The program will help educate mathematics and statistics undergraduate students who are prepared to confront new challenges in CDS&E. Training students to think mathematically while working with big data will prove useful for students' successful careers in many application areas.
The project will feature curricular enhancements, research mentoring, and faculty development. The curricular enhancements will add new courses centered about the theme of CDS&E; the undergraduate research mentoring program will provide research experience for talented undergraduates majors in mathematics or statistics. The research projects will themselves involve CDS&E research questions arising from network dynamics, biological data analysis, clustering, topology of large data sets, and compressive sensing. Among the new courses to be offered are mathematics of networks, the statistics of data exploration, and CDS&E mathematical modeling; the courses will be focused on the variety of topics, including network data analysis, biological network data, graphical techniques for data exploration, statistical computing, dimension analysis, and modeling of large data sets. Summer workshops for faculty will enhance the skills of college faculty in CDS&E.
