The South Big Data Hub links talented students with tech startups through a DataStart program, which provides real-world experiences for students while helping entrepreneurial companies.

Graduate students from six universities in the southern U.S. will spend the summer working on data challenges important to the success of new and growing technology companies thanks to a new program called the Southern Startup Internship Program in Data Science (DataStart).

Through DataStart, interns will have the opportunity to address a wide range of data-related business problems in a professional setting, including spotting trends in the diversity of people included in clinical trials, developing methods for using sensor data to detect loads on wind turbines, and the challenges of cleansing and standardizing data to extract more knowledge from it.

By giving students the opportunity to apply their data science research skills in a real-world business environment, the DataStart program is helping to build the next generation workforce, commented Lea Shanley, PhD, co-Executive Director of the South Big Data Hub at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It also contributes to our economy by building data science capacity within seed-to early-stage businesses.

A list of the students, their host companies, and projects can be found here.

The program was launched this year by the South Big Data Hub, one of four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The DataStart program, in particular, is supported by a grant from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), an organization that promotes innovative, high-impact research in the national computing community, as part of its program sponsoring Industry-Academic Collaboration with the four Big Data Hubs.

With our mission to catalyze the community and enable high impact computing research, the CCC feels strongly that enabling industry-academic collaborations early in one’s career, such as those happening through the DataStart program, are key to the vitality of the research ecosystem. We look forward to hearing about the new collaborations formed through DataStart, commented Ann Drobnis, Director of the Computing Community Consortium.

About the South Big Data Hub

The South Big Data Regional Innovation Hub, sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, serves 16 states in the southern U.S. and the District of Columbia, including Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Led jointly by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Georgia Institute of Technology, the South Big Data Hub aims to build innovative public-private partnerships that address regional challenges through big data analysis. For more information, visit www.southbdhub.org