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Research Computing hosted NSF ACCESS workshops on Machine Learning and Big Data

USC Research Computing (RC) hosted in-person remote sites for two presentations of the National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS workshop on "Machine Learning and Big Data".  The first workshop was on May 23-24, 2023, from 11AM to 5PM in Room 1400 of the Innovation Center, and the second was from July 1st to August 1st, 2023 in the South Carolina Political Collections Seminar Room 130 of the Hollings Special Collections Library. These workshops were presented by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.  PSC provides access to several of the most powerful systems for high performance computing, communications, and data storage available to university, government, and industrial research institutions nationwide. Day One covered the rise of big data production and big data processing. PSC then taught an introduction to using Spark and Python to handle databases of big data, transform the data, and output the results - along with exercises to practice these techniques. Day One concluded with an introduction to machine learning for clustering and data with potenitally hundreds or thousands of dimensions. Day Two began with the participants using Spark to build a recomendation system similar to the ones used by major streaming platforms. PSC then covered the topic of classification with deep learning, using input, output, and hidden nodes to divide non-linear data, with a demo being done as an example. Day Two concluded with a "big picture" overview of big data and machine learning, showing the uses and current developments of artificial intelligence and deep learning, as well as a discussion of how fast the field is moving forward.


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