Digging into Data (DiD) Research: MIRACLE

 

Research Overview

 

WICI core member and director Dawn Parker has received new grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) via the Digging into Data Challenge (DiD). The international DiD program was established to advance the use of computational methods to explore, analyze and visualize the rapidly expanding pool of crowd-sourced and remotely sensed “big data” from real-world systems. Unique among this year’s awards, Parker’s research team is developing tools to analyze output from computerized simulation models and compare that output to real-world “big data.”

The University of Waterloo is the lead institution for the larger DiD $567,000 (U.S.) project titled, Mining relationships among variables in large datasets from complex systems (MIRACLE). Local WICI team members include post-doc Xiongbing Jin and graduate student Kirsten Robinson. The project will be hosted through the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI). The international team includes participants from Arizona State University, USA (PI C. Michael Barton ) the University of Twente, NL (PI Tatiana Filatova) the University of Dundee, UK (PI Terence P. Dawson ) and the James Hutton Institute UK (Collaborator J. Gary Pohill).

MIRACLE will be a community platform that will support complex systems research across research communities. Our research group is very appreciative of SSHRC’s top dollar support for our innovative new venture to create community infrastructure that will be available to local stakeholders, university researchers, and the international community to support complex systems research.

 

Additional Resources

 

You can download a draft paper on how to use the prototype MIRACLE cloud-based platform here.

You can download a PDF overview of the technical details of this research project here.

For related work on the University of Waterloo campus, see also Session One of the WICI Data Visualization & Analysis Symposium.

Download the Call for Participation to the related workshop at the 8^th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs 2014) conference here.

 

Press Releases

 

January 16th, 2014 – National Science Foundation (NSF), National Science Foundation contributes to four international projects in data-intensive social science and humanities research

January 17th, 2014 – University of Waterloo, Waterloo researcher uses big data to see LRT impact on housing market

January 23rd, 2014 – Arizona State University, ASU professor wins ‘Digging Into Data’ challenge