ACADEMIA

In a world where we create over two quintillion bytes of data every day, global leaders in academia, industry, and government are grappling with the problem of how to organize, store, evaluate, share, and protect this vast amount of information. To address the questions surrounding this powerful and growing field of data discovery, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers (http://www.liebertpub.com) announces the launch of Big Data, a highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal that will provide a unique forum for world-class research exploring the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data, including big data analytics.

"There is significant need for a journal on big data that will enable discussions, exchange of important ideas, and facilitate debate through a multimedia journal platform," says Mary Ann Liebert, President of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. "We need to harness the vast opportunities lying within big data to gain knowledge that will potentially solve many of the problems we face as a global society. This journal has this mandate."

A multidisciplinary editorial team of opinion leaders is gathering to build this new forum for the big data community, including Executive Editor Eugene Kolker, PhD, Chief Data Officer, Seattle Children's Hospital; Geoffrey Charles Fox, PhD, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies & Research, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington; Sorin Istrail, PhD, Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences, Professor of Computer Science, Brown University; Folker Meyer, Computational Biologist, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL and Associate Division Director of the Institute of Genomics and Systems Biology, Chicago, IL; and Rick Stevens, PhD, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, Professor of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Senior Fellow of the University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory Computation Institute (CI), co-Director of the Argonne Futures Lab.

This immense amount of data originates from an endless variety of sources including patient information and medical records, complex and interdisciplinary scientific research, military surveillance, financial transactions and account set-ups, customer behavior and product pricing analysis, tweet-mining, and much more.

Big Data will facilitate and support the efforts of researchers, analysts, statisticians, business leaders, and policymakers to improve operations, profitability, and communications within their organizations. Spanning a broad array of disciplines focusing on novel big data technologies, policies, and innovations, the Journal will bring together the community to address the challenges and discover new breakthroughs and trends living within this information. The Journal will be published in print and online.