RTP’s Frontier Welcomes REACH NC

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

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

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

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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

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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Cleversafe joins the iRODS Consortium

CHAPEL HILL, NC, May 12, 2015 – Cleversafe, the market share leader in web-scale data storage, will become the ninth member of the iRODS Consortium, a membership-based foundation organized to sustain the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software.

Cleversafe, a Chicago-based company, delivers a breakthrough private cloud platform that solves petabyte-and-beyond storage challenges. Relied upon by the world’s largest data repositories, Cleversafe reduces 80 percent or more of storage costs while providing carrier-grade security, 15 nines of reliability, and simplified storage management. Cleversafe joins a growing list of consortium members who have gathered to collaborate on iRODS, free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration and data virtualization. The consortium was formed by RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center, both research institutes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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iRODS to celebrate banner year at 2015 User Group Meeting

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Users from around the globe who use iRODS, the open source data management platform now developed at RENCI and sustained through the iRODS Consortium, will meet in Chapel Hill June 10 and 11 for the 2015 iRODS User Group Meeting (UGM).

The UGM is an annual opportunity for iRODS users and developers to discuss iRODS-enabled applications and discoveries, technologies developed around iRODS, and future development and sustainability of iRODS and the iRODS Consortium.

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Bringing big data to the social sciences

Much has been said about big data and its potential to improve business productivity, understand risks, and improve medial diagnoses. But first and foremost, data is about people: how they interact with each other and their environment, their beliefs, the choices they make, and the significance of those choices.

With so much human-focused data available, social scientists have the opportunity to learn much from the big data revolution, but they need the technological infrastructure and resources to work with massive amounts of what is often unstructured and unwieldy data. Gleaning knowledge from data requires powerful computers, flexible and reliable data management platforms, high performance networks for moving and sharing data, and massive amounts of storage.

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Providing security for a world of distributed data

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Every spring, the UNC-Chapel Hill community showcases its most promising and innovative early-stage startups at an event called the UNC Innovation Showcase. The event illustrates how university research can lead to innovative products that benefit consumers, healthcare professionals, and many business sectors.

Over the years, a number of new companies nurtured by RENCI have been featured at the showcase, and this year RENCI again had a presence, not through a startup but with a presentation of a new technology called Secure Research Space (SRS).

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RENCI to collaborate with UNC Charlotte and NC State on technologies for big data analytics

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Researchers at RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill), UNC Charlotte and North Carolina State University will develop advanced technologies and solutions that will position North Carolina as a leader in data science research and applied data analytics and will enable university researchers and business practitioners to use big data to manage risks, gain knowledge, and compete in the global economy.  Read more