K. Selçuk Candan is the primary investigator for CASCADE
Selçuk Candan, Hasan Davulcu, and Gail-Joon Ahn, three computer science and engineering professors at ASU, are leading a group of researchers who have been awarded a planning grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the creation of an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Assured and SCAlable Data Engineering (CASCADE), a collaborative effort with the University of Maryland, College Park.
The idea for the center is a response to the data revolution that is transforming many aspects of modern life, including our economies and all branches of science, said Candan, a faculty member in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering.
The amount of data being generated and consumed by individuals, governments, and industries is massive, complex and increasingly diverse due to recent technological innovations and greater affordability of digital devices.
“Recently, we organized a roundtable at ASU to discuss the challenges, approaches, and needs of the industry with respect to data services,” Candan said. “The roundtable brought together executives, researchers and engineers representing various industry sectors.”
The key outcomes of the meeting, he said, highlighted that, “despite its breathtaking impacts on our lives and the extraordinary permeation of diverse data technologies in the tools we use daily in our homes and work places, this data revolution is being impeded by ad hoc approaches to the design of data technologies, hampering innovation and preventing solutions to urgent social and economic challenges.”
CASCADE’s mission is to enable a fundamental shift, through synergistic partnerships with the industry, from those ad hoc approaches to the engineering of data systems to a principled framework for the engineering of data systems that support reliable and timely data-driven decision making.
Within the CASCADE innovation ecosystem, these synergistic partnerships will be complemented with a Research Center, aiming to tackle key data challenges through inter-disciplinary and fundamental research, and a Data Services Center, aiming to provide data services to a wide spectrum of partners in industry and academia.
The leadership of the ASU effort will be based in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decisions Systems Engineering but will draw on expertise in other disciplines from faculty elsewhere at the university, including the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for statistical modeling, the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering for expertise in sensors, and the W. P. Carey School of Business for knowledge of information systems, and other faculty in other schools with domain expertise and data skills.
