

MIT Announces New Institute for Data, Systems, and Society - denzil_correa
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-launches-idss-0408

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mturmon
Here is the very long report that supported the decision to establish this
institute:
[http://orgchart.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/20140504...](http://orgchart.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/20140504_Provost_FormNewEntity.pdf)

I found it when trying to discover who their new Statistics strategic hire is.
The possibility of a PhD in Stats from MIT is weird.

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hudibras
While shopping around for statistics PhD programs to apply for, I found it
strange that MIT seemed like the only "name" school that didn't have a
program. So n=1, but seems to me that they recognize that they are losing out
by not having a formal stats PhD program.

Edit: Just noticed on page 20 that one of the discarded name proposals for the
new program was the "Institute for Statistics and Information Systems (ISIS)."

~~~
mturmon
That was also my impression, especially considering that CMU has a Machine
Learning department (above and beyond their existing Stats Dept.) and there
are Data Science Master's programs popping up all around. Get on the bus!

The politics and turf battles must be fascinating, because if there is one
(technical) discipline that feels encroached-upon and under-appreciated, it's
statistics. Finally, some appreciation, and they'd hate to cede any control to
(say) a bunch of upstarts from the CS dept. who wouldn't know a James-Stein
estimator from Adam.

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mrdrozdov
This is interesting news. It seems that all the big companies and universities
are equipping themselves to tackle the data problem at a larger scale. I
wonder if this is because companies like Google/Facebook/Baidu found
themselves ahead of academia when tackling problems at large scale. Or perhaps
data warehouses are bursting at the seams with useful information waiting for
qualified people to analyze them.

You can read some about NYU's Data Science Program here:
[http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/nyu-data-science-program-
ov...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/nyu-data-science-program-
overview.html)

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mspecter
I'm a grad student in the department this is replacing, but will be continuing
on to the PhD program in EECS.

I'm really excited to see this happening, the department it was replacing
needed a bit of help and it's good to see MIT doubling down on the idea that
sociotechnical systems are worth studying.

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tinkerdol
What department is it replacing?

