“Big Data” Talks Take Center Stage at 2016 IEEE SPS Summer School at Pitt

The Swanson School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society (SPS), will host the 2016 Summer School on Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Big Data from May 17–19. The program is open to university students, faculty and general practitioners (e.g., engineers, scientists, researchers).

Enormous amounts of data generated on a daily basis by humans, machines and other sensors provide opportunities to collect highly useful information with unprecedented efficiency and outcomes. Big Data analysis, however, presents challenges ranging from weeding out useless information to human visualization and interpretation of the collected data.

"The importance of understanding Big Data will only increase as machines become more clever and people become more efficient at interpreting the information they've collected," said Ervin Sejdic, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Pitt and co-chair and finance chair of the Summer School organizing committee. "We are honored that the Signal Processing Society selected our proposal to organize the 2016 Summer School. Pitt's outstanding facilities and expertise in the field certainly played a role in the selection committee's decision."

The Summer School will address current efforts to explore Big Data from a signal processing perspective, including Big Data applications in social networks, behavior and language analysis, bioinformatics and environmental monitoring as well as foundations for Big Data analysis and processing such as robust statistical methods, sparse representations, numerical linear algebra, machine learning, convergence and complexity analysis.

Over the course of three days, the event will feature lecturers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California in Los Angeles, Purdue University, the University of Maryland, the University of Toronto and the University of Pittsburgh. Lecturers from ANSYS, Rockwell Automation, Google and the IBM Watson project will also be in attendance and discuss the topic from an industry perspective.

For more information and to register for the event, please visit http://www.engineering.pitt.edu/ieeesps/. Registration closes on April 30.

The IEEE SPS Seasonal Schools in Signal Processing Program began in 2010 with the main objective of generating student interest in signal processing. There have been 17 Summer Schools in 14 countries since the program was established. The 2016 Summer School at Pitt will be the first time the program is held in the United States and the second time in North America.

More information:
Paul Kovach, Director of Marketing and Communications
Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh
412-624-0265 (pkovach@pitt.edu)

Provided by University of Pittsburgh