The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) was inaugurated on Monday in the presence of Lino Guzzella, president of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), and Martin Vetterli, president of the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). The celebration in Bern also saw Jure Leskovec, professor at Stanford University and social network Pinterest chief scientist, present as the keynote speaker.
The new centre, which will be located in Zurich and Lausanne, will help ensure Switzerland possesses the necessary expertise in the field of data science to be competitive globally. As the ETH explained in a statement, this subject, which is gaining global importance, is a new tool to help better analyse complex real-world systems. Data science has particular importance for personalised medicine, and will form a focus, alongside manufacturing challenges, for the scientists at the SDSC.
“We depend on data scientists’ unique expertise to help us pull relevant insights from masses of data. The new data science center brings these experts together, offering an interdisciplinary platform that will also promote education and knowledge transfer,” commented Guzzella in the statement.
Another aim of the SDSC is to develop an innovative cloud-hosted platform for analysis. The so-called Insights Factory will host, explore and analyse curated, calibrated and anonymised data. “This new platform is a fundamental step in the development of Open Science,” commented Vetterli.
