UNC, RENCI join research network focused on improving healthcare in the Southeast

Published: September 18, 2015

RENCI will participate in informatics team for new translational medicine award

CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of multiple new sites to join the Mid-South Clinical Data Research Network (CDRN), a collaborative partnership that is harnessing data from electronic health records to improve outcomes for patients throughout the Southeast. The expansion is funded by a three-year, $8.5 million funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

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NCDS DataBytes Lunchtime Webinar Series provides forum for data science topics

Published: September 8, 2015

April 2015 marked the start of the new National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) DataBytes Lunchtime Webinar Series. Launched as an opportunity to discuss the most interesting issues and ideas in data science, the series gives NCDS members and the broader data science community a chance to delve into a new topic each month.

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IoT for the Industrial Internet workshop defines key research questions

Published: August 14, 2015

Internet-enabled sensors and devices that network and communicate with each other – often called the Internet of Things (IoT) – are considered by many to be the next grand challenge in big data. While the constant connectivity of the IoT offers the potential to improve our economies, communities, and health, it also presents new challenges.

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Harnessing the power of data for quality breast cancer detection

Published: August 6, 2015

RENCI-enhanced software helps reduce false positives and maintain compliance.

Currently, about 12 percent of the female population will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetimes, and for women in the U.S., breast cancer death rates are higher than those for any other cancer, besides lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Despite these harsh realities, the death rates from breast cancer have steadily decreased since 1989, a trend often attributed to treatment advances and increased screening.

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iRODS Consortium announces iRODS Partners and iRODS Hub to support growing user-developer community

Published: July 29, 2015

CHAPEL HILL, NC – The iRODS Consortium has launched two new services to support the continued growth of its strong, dynamic user and developer communities.

iRODS—the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System—is free open source data management software that helps organizations control massive amounts of unstructured data by providing capabilities including automated organization, archiving, access control, auditing, and search. The iRODS Consortium is a membership organization that supports ongoing iRODS development. It is based at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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RTP’s Frontier Welcomes REACH NC

Published: July 22, 2015

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – REACH NC, the Web portal that helps bring the expertise of thousands of North Carolina-based researchers to businesses, developers, government agencies, and the public, has a new home at The Frontier, the new state-of-the-art space in Research Triangle Park designed to foster collaboration and community among business people and entrepreneurs.

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DataBridge shines a light on dark data

Published: July 17, 2015

Chapel Hill, NC – Even in the age of big data, most research data is created by small research teams or individual investigators. These researchers collect their data, analyze it, and usually store it on a local hard drive or network where it is impossible for future researchers to access it.

Individually, these data sets are small, but in the aggregate, they too can be defined as big data. In science, they are referred to as “dark data,” an untapped treasure trove of information that other researchers are unable to discover and use.

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Data Matters draws over 100 students to Chapel Hill

Published: June 30, 2015

International group of students sharpen data science skills in short course series.

A second cohort of students recently wrapped up their summer data science learning at the Data Matters Short Course Series. A total of 132 business managers, data analytics specialists, academic researchers, and others who grapple with big data attended the short course series held during the last full week of June at the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill.

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Getting to know RENCI’s Social Computing Rooms

Published: June 25, 2015

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CHAPEL HILL, NC – Big data and data presented as imagery hold great value as tools for educators and researchers, but working with enormous data sets can be overwhelming.

Medical records, social networking data, environmental measurements gleaned from remote sensors, online transactions, and more can help doctors diagnose their patients, allow businesses to better serve their customers, and help scientists understand everything from how cancers spread to the impact of climate change on ecosystems.

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iRODS Consortium welcomes IBM as latest member

Published: May 28, 2015

CHAPEL HILL, NC – IBM is the latest company to join the iRODS Consortium, a membership organization of users and service providers that sustains the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software.

IBM has signed an agreement that will make the company the eighth member of the consortium. IBM joins DataDirect Networks (DDN), EMC Corporation, Seagate, the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Atmospheric Science Data Center at NASA Langley Research Center, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environment (DICE) center as members of the two-year-old consortium.

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