by Angela Guess
Alex Knapp reports for Forbes, “Adobe announced today that it would be hosting its third Data Science Symposium on May 26 of this year. At the symposium, the company will also be giving grants of up to $50,000 to university researchers in data science. Since 2014, the company has given away 18 such grants. The reason for the grants, Anil Kamath, VP of Technology at Adobe explained to me, is because over the past few years, Adobe has made a big push into digital marketing. And that’s produced a lot of data and analytics for the company. ‘We initiated the data science symposium and research awards to collaborate with universities in specific areas of data science where a lot of interesting work is happening in universities,’ he told me. ‘Real apps. Real data. Lots of applications. Not just some toy models or data’.”
Knapp goes on, “Winners of the research grants get access to Adobe’s cloud data, enabling them to do work on the trillions of transactions conducted per year using Adobe’s Cloud software. The research grants aren’t limited to marketing research, although such awards have been granted. Kamath indicated to me that awards have been granted for other related data applications such as machine learning or new algorithms. UC Santa Cruz professor Lise Getoor received the Adobe Faculty Award in 2014 for her research, and is currently working with Adobe on her projects. She noted that she appreciates the ability to apply research to real data.”
photo credit: Adobe