The first industrial revolution was rooted in Newton’s laws of mechanics, which served as the foundations for the development of steam engines and mechanical production. The second industrial revolution was rooted in Faraday’s and Maxwell’s laws of electricity and magnetism, which served as the foundations for the development of electric generation, electric engines, assembly lines, and the telegraph. The third industrial revolution was rooted in Shannon’s theory of information and Turing’s theory of computing, which, together with the discovery of the transistor, served as the foundations for the development of computers, the internet, and modern communication networks and smartphones.

We are on the verge of the fourth industrial revolution, where advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics will allow machines to learn from massive amounts of complex high-dimensional data. However, the theoretical foundations that will enable this “Data Science Revolution” have not yet been fully developed.

The Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS) at Johns Hopkins University brings together a multidisciplinary team of mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and engineers to develop the fundamental mathematical, statistical, and computational principles for the analysis and interpretation of massive amounts of complex high-dimensional data. The institute will also help develop multidisciplinary educational programs on the foundations of data science, and foster interactions among data scientists through a series of collaborative research workshops and summer schools.

Please join us in this bold agenda.

Sincerely,

René Vidal
Director, Johns Hopkins Mathematical Institute for Data Science