Caltech Associates East Coast Reception & Dinner: Virtual Reality's Next Frontier
Location: The Lotos Club, New York, New York
6:00 p.m. Reception
7:00 p.m. Dinner and program
8:00 p.m. Networking, dessert, and coffee
The era of "big data" brings new opportunities for a scientific discovery, but also significant challenges: how do we discover the knowledge hudden in the data sets of an ever increasing complexity? This challenge also applies to every aspect of modern society that is being transformed by the big data revolution - business and commerce, personalized medicine, security, etc.
The growing data complexity often manifests as abstract data spaces having tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dimensions, and their exploration exceeds the cognitive capacity of the human mind. We are increasingly relying on machine intelligence to help us discover interesting patterns in the data, but we cannot do that blindly: effectice visualization is a key component of the data mining and analysis, and a bridge to the human intuition, pattern recognition, and understanding.
The emerging technologies of virtual reality provide a powerful new platform for data exploration—and a more powerful human-computer collaborative discovery.
George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy and director of Caltech's Center for Data Driven Discovery, has studied many different topics in astronomy and cosmology and led several large digital sky surveys. He was a co-founder of both the virtual observatory framework and the emerging discipline of astroinformatics. He is currently investigating the ways in which computing is fundamentally changing how we approach science, scholarship, and education.
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This event is open to members of the Caltech Associates and guests. For more information and to learn how to join, please visit our website or contact the Associates office at (626) 395-3919.
With a proud history of support dating back to 1926, the Caltech Associates are a vibrant organization of more than 2,000 members who are investors in discovery. Membership helps advance Caltech's most ambitious projects, including new treatments for disease, insights into nature, and technologies that could change the way people live their lives.
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