Miami, FL, February 8, 2016
When Dr. Fatemeh Abyarjoo began her participation as an Open Science Data Cloud International Research and Education (OSDC-PIRE) fellow through CIARA, she did not know it would be a life-changing experience. Before her fellowship, Dr. Abyarjoo was pursuing her doctorate at FIU in Electrical Engineering. At the time, she was researching the feasibility of a virtual reality glove used to track human hand motion, which would be used in multiple applications — in healthcare (monitoring the rehabilitation after a stroke or seizure or observing elderly patients) in athletics (recording athlete’s movements to assist trainers and coaches), and recreationally (virtual reality gaming). In her research, Dr. Abyarjoo gathered real-time information all day long from three sensors located within the gloves. Each of these sensors had a sampling grade of 213 samples per second; as one can imagine, this generated a huge amount of data, and she faced limitations in managing, storing, and processing data.
In summer 2015, Dr. Abyarjoo decided to pursue a fellowship to assist her in completes her doctorate. She chose the OSDC-PIRE project from FIU’s Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA), which provides research and education experiences through training and study at universities and research institutes around the world with leading scientists in the field of computing. To complete her thesis, she traveled to the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In this collaborative environment, Dr. Abyarjoo thrived.
“It was really interesting because graduate school did not allow me to be exposed to other fields which required big data. In that program, my colleagues were from different departments — I was exposed to people from economy, biology, physics, media — people with different backgrounds,” said Dr. Abyarjoo. “Seeing how this field (big data) is applicable to other fields was a really good experience, and getting feedback was valuable as you cannot find it when you are in a specific department, where you have same-minded people around you. Having the background from other people with different backgrounds was very valuable”.
Because of Dr. Abyarjoo’s previous familiarity with mathematics and algorithms, as she became more familiar with cloud computing, she found that she had a base knowledge of multiple applications in various fields that interested her — finance, marketing, economy, politics, etc. Because of her participation in the CIARA program, after Dr. Abyarjoo graduated with her doctorate in Electrical Engineering from FIU, she switched careers from engineering to data science and now works in the financial industry.
Two years ago, Dr. Abyarjoo did not imagine herself switching from engineering to science, and had no idea of the various applications of big data. Because of her exposure to big data analytics during her OSDC-PIRE fellowship, Dr. Abyarjoo found that she had a passion for big data, and now has landed her dream job as a data scientist. “Everyone talks about big data, but nobody knows what it is – there is vague knowledge and understanding,” said Dr. Abyarjoo, “If you know big data — that opens doors”.
NSF Award# IIA-1129076, $4,224,324, 2010 – 2015, PIRE: Training and Workshops in Data Intensive Computing Using The Open Science Data Cloud
For more information about research and other opportunities available from CIARA, email us at contacts@amlight.net or call 305-348-4105.
