WATERLOO, Ont. (Wednesday, June 5, 2013) – Research projects that will investigate new techniques of analyzing Big Data are among the many projects from the University of Waterloo that received more than $1.6 million in funding today from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Leaders Opportunity Fund.
"Cluster Computing Infrastructure for Scalable Big Data Management and Analysis," is the project of Professors Tamer Özsu, Ian Munro and Khuzaima Daudjee of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. They received $215,414 to purchase the computing infrastructure to develop the software for analyzing graphs that represent many real-life applications such as social networks and web data. This technology could be valuable to social scientists, marketers or others interested in understanding the interconnections between different pieces of data.
Professor Ashraf Aboulnaga and Professor Hans De Sterck, both also from the Faculty of Mathematics, received $159,158 for their project entitled, "Research Infrastructure for Computational Analytics on Big Data in the Cloud." The funding enables them to acquire essential infrastructure to analyze and improve Hadoop, an open source software system that is used widely in business, academia and science to analyze large data sets. The results could lead to insights into how our online social networks evolve, or if used in a business setting, recommend people for specific jobs or marketing opportunities.
"Waterloo researchers from four different Faculties and representing 18 innovative projects were recognized today,” said Feridun Hamdullahpur, president and vice-chancellor of Waterloo. “These grants provide critical support so that they may conduct their transformative work. I offer my congratulations to the teams of talented researchers identified in today's announcement."
Funding from the CFI, an initiative of the federal government, helps pay for equipment, building additions and other infrastructure associated with research. Eighteen research projects at Waterloo will share $1,685,143. Grants to Waterloo in this round of CFI funding range from $34,740 to $215,414.
