(03.03.20) “Data is the new oil” – with this enigmatic motto, Prof Ranjan Bose, Director of IIIT Delhi, inaugurated the fourth international spring school of the DFG-funded priority programme “Algorithms for Big Data” (SPP 1736), held in New Delhi in February 2020. For the third time, the Principal Investigators of the programme chose India as their partner country in which their annual spring school would take place. “This was a natural choice for us”, Prof. Dorothea Wagner (KIT Karlsruhe) explains, noting that there are many strong Indian partner groups and institutions in the field of algorithmic engineering.
On various dimensions, the Indo-German spring school “Algorithms for Big Data” was extremely diverse. It brought together researchers from India and Germany, with some further participants joining from the US. It included experts from academia and from industry giants such as Apple and Uber. And it covered foundational issues of theoretical computer science and mathematics as well as topics of very concrete application, the overarching theme being the retrieval (and manipulation) of huge data sets with algorithmic approaches.
Students and experts could learn and exchange knowledge on topics ranging from developments in linear algebra or graph theory to scaling up computational tasks to great numbers of CPUs working in parallel or to advanced issues in image processing. “Algorithms for Big Data come in various forms – the school enables the participants to get to know many facets of them in a short time”, Professor Ulrich Meyer (University of Frankfurt) explains. But the participants also had plenty of time to get to know each other – and each others’ cultures. “Spring schools are not only about science”, Meyer insists: “The intercultural learning is equally important. This is why SPP 1736 has already been to India three times.”
The Programme “Algorithms for Big Data” is one of DFG’s current “Priority Programmes”. Priority Programmes enable the nationwide collaboration between its participating researchers in areas of science of particular importance. Such programmes are set up by DFG’s Senate for a typical duration of six years. DFG India Office is always happy to assist DFG projects interested in reaching out to India.