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About CDAC


The Center for Data and Computing (CDAC) is an intellectual hub and incubator for data science and artificial intelligence research at the University of Chicago. We catalyze new discoveries by fusing fundamental and applied research with real-world applications. As the focus point for data science research on campus, we engage leaders from industry, government, and academia through innovative events and partnerships to spark new collaborations and technological discoveries.

The mission of CDAC is to address important scientific and societal questions through coordinated advances in applications, models, algorithms, and platforms. To execute this goal, we:

  • Incubate question-driven, interdisciplinary research of an intellectual scope that is broader than what is typical of a single academic department or school.
  • Convene a multidisciplinary community to advance science and discovery through data and computation, with programs including workshops, talks, and internships.
  • Partner with groups across the science and technology ecosystem both on campus and beyond, including national laboratories, private companies, and government agencies.

The Center for Data and Computing partners with the UChicago Department of Computer Science and is co-located with the department in the John Crerar Library Building. But as an initiative of the Office of the Provost, the scope of CDAC stretches beyond Computer Science, facilitating research partnerships and programming for all UChicago divisions, departments, and schools. CDAC is also part of an ambitious, multi-year expansion of computer and data science efforts at the University of Chicago.

CDAC builds upon the successes of the Computation Institute (CI), a joint initiative of UChicago and Argonne National Laboratory that fostered collaborative and applied computational research on both campuses. It was founded in 2018 based on recommendations from a faculty committee led by Michael J. Franklin, Liew Family Chair of Computer Science and Senior Advisor to the Provost for Computation and Data Science.