Welcome to CCLS: Center for Computational Learning Systems

Mission

The Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) aims to be a world leader in learning and data mining research and the application of this research to natural language understanding, the World Wide Web, bioinformatics, systems security and other emerging areas. CCLS will emphasize interdisciplinary efforts with other departments at Columbia, and will leverage Columbia's CS Department's strengths in learning, data mining and natural language processing, extending the effective size and scope of the Department's research effort.

Motivation

Data is growing faster than our ability to comprehend it. Vast amounts of data are being collected by industries, governments, universities and individuals, and the rates of data growth are accelerating, fueled by cheap storage and computing hardware together with the Internet and the automation of business processes. This data implicitly contains patterns that can lead to a great increase in human knowledge and understanding, but the growth of the data is outpacing the ability of humans to comprehend it unaided. Learning and data mining technologies offer the potential for turning this data into knowledge. There are great opportunities for progress in applying known learning and data mining techniques to new application areas as well as for progress in developing new, efficient algorithms and innovative problem formulations.