UC San Diego’s Data Planet Initiative Marks Next Phase of Growth and Leadership

Published October 31, 2024

By Joshua Stewart, SDSC Communications

As the world faces challenges from climate change to public health, data-intensive solutions have become more significant. In light of this, the Data Planet Initiative at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), one of the pillars of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego, has been providing Ph.D. students with opportunities to engage in real-world, data-centric projects alongside faculty and industry partners. 

Preparing for a new round of fellowship applications in 2025, the Data Planet Initiative marks its next phase of growth and innovation under the leadership of Associate Professor Jingbo Shang at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering and at HDSI. Plans include increasing the number of fellows and introducing new research projects.  

“With our fellows, we’re building a new infrastructure for data science—just like GitHub is for code or Google for web pages or Hugging Face for machine learning. We envision Data Planet as the go-to hub for all datasets, accessible to everyone who needs them for research,” said Shang. “What excites me most is the platform's ability to bridge different research domains and help researchers find datasets that might push their work in new directions.” 

HDSI Faculty Fellow Arun Kumar, who is an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering and previously led the Data Planet Initiative, said that the program will benefit from Shang’s leadership. “Jingbo is a world-renowned expert on information retrieval and tools for data mining. He has exciting plans for expanding its capabilities, usability and scaling to more users.”  

The Promise of Partnership 

The Data Planet Initiative partnerships include the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the other pillar of SCIDS, which has provided the storage backend and web server hosting for the program’s website. The SDSC team has also engaged with fellows to collaborate on cutting-edge research tools and projects to expand their networks – contributing as a collective resource for the UC San Diego campus. An additional partner includes Dataverse, which is an open-source community whose software has been reused for the initiative. 

“Through greater engagement with industry partners in emerging fields, SCIDS provides better training for students, as well as new opportunities for new courses, training and degree programs that build and sustain an ecosystem of startups and established local companies,” said SCIDS Interim Dean Rajesh Gupta, also the founding director of HDSI. “The initiative's growth shows our collective commitment to advancing data science and providing students with more opportunities to excel and tackle today's and tomorrow's most pressing challenges.” 

Focus on Fellows 

Since the announcement of its inaugural fellows in 2022, the Data Planet Initiative has not only aimed to provide datasets useful for its fellows’ research but also strengthened their successes. Inaugural fellows like Alessandro D'Amico, Isaac Nealey, Shuheng Li and Zhongyang Zhang have laid the foundation for the initiative's ability to foster and enhance innovation. This commitment to fostering innovation is reflected in their diverse projects, which include research on how event cameras can improve efficiency and bridge the gap between traditional RGB-based computer vision. Additional past projects have focused on building a multimodal human activity recognition database and creating a pipeline for collecting electroencephalography (EEG) data. 

Nealey’s research as a graduate in Computer Science at UC San Diego focuses on developing data visualization simulations for wildland fire monitoring and land management. “A physicist working on the computational fluid dynamics-based fire propagation models may wish to visualize highly granular outputs to understand how the model is behaving at a particular time step or geographical location, whereas a firefighter serving in a management role is much more interested in landscape-scale trends and the public safety implications of a certain fire behavior,” he said.  

Zhang, another inaugural fellow of the initiative, recently had his work published in the Elsevier Neurocomputing journal. “I successfully completed and further refined my first event camera-related project titled ‘Neuromorphic High-Frequency 3D Dancing Pose Estimation in Dynamic Environments’,” said Zhang. “I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Data Planet Fellowship and all the staff members involved. Your unwavering support has been instrumental in making these achievements possible.” 

Details about applying for the next Data Planet Initiative Fellows cohort will be announced in 2025. More information about the initiative can be found on the Data Planet website. For more news about SCIDS, HDSI and SDSC, visit the SCIDS website.