The United States Census Bureau, in collaboration with the MIT Libraries Program on Information Science, is convening a series of workshops to examine the challenges and prospects of integrating Big Data into statistical agencies. These workshops, which are funded by the Census Bureau and hosted at MIT, will bring together select experts in universities, industry, and the U.S. government to apply diverse approaches to big data to use cases regularly encountered by statistical agencies.

Incorporating new forms and scales of data can enhance and strengthen official statistics in many ways, including improving sample survey estimates, increasing efficiency, and lowering costs by continuously adapting survey design and implementation based on response, and helping agencies improve the frequency and timeliness of data releases. Libraries have long been a portal for public access to and understanding of government information, and are increasingly hosting programs in data management.

The expected outcome of the workshops, which begin this summer, will be a report identifying new opportunities for using big data to augment economic official statistics, core computational and methodological challenges, and promising areas for future applied research that will inform the Census Big Data research program.

For more information see: Census-MIT Big Data Workshop Series.