The Harvard Business Review, last October, wrote that data scientists had “the sexiest job[s] of the 21st century.”

In recent weeks, however, the field of data analytics has lost at least some of its public appeal with the controversy surrounding leaks of classified information by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

So last week when the NSA and N.C. State announced that the two institutions had collaborated to establish the $60.75 million Laboratory for Analytic Sciences on the University’s Centennial Campus, the news made national headlines.

The grant is the biggest ever awarded to N.C. State, three times more than the any previous award, according to the News & Observer.

Originally scheduled to be announced in June, Randy Avent, a professor of computer science, and principal investigator of the laboratory, said the controversy surrounding the Snowden incident caused N.C. State and the NSA to reconsider the timing of their joint announcement.

“It was delayed as one might expect,” Avent said. “When the Snowden thing came out was about the time we were expecting to make an announcement. For a large part, the NSA decided that they didn’t want to announce then, but it was  not an unreasonable thing to want to wait. Everyone agreed that it was best to delay the announcement.” 

Those worried N.C. State will become a hub of surveillance operations can rest easy, according to Avent who said, “It’s a research lab. There are no operational problems being worked on at all. It’s a research lab conducting basic research concerning questions like ‘What are the fundamental techniques?’ and ‘What’s the fundamental math behind the problem?’”

While a press release announcing the partnership said the laboratory  would bring 100 new jobs to the Triangle during the next five years, Avent said that was probably a fairly conservative estimate. He predicted that the Triangle would see much more growth than projected over the next few years in this area.

Avent said a driving factor behind the choice of N.C. State was Centennial Campus.

“When Centennial Campus was created 30-some years ago, it was quite out of the ordinary to have a vision that we’re going to bring together industry, academia and government,” Avent said.

Avent said another major reason N.C. State was an ideal choice was because of the interdisciplinary nature of the laboratory and the interdisciplinary nature of the work currently being conducted at the University. The project will bring together researchers not only from the colleges of science and engineering, but also from CHASS and the Poole College of Management.

“When [NSA staffers] were coming here and visiting the faculty, what they were impressed by was the willingness of all of the faculty to work together on the hard problems,” Avent said.

Avent defined “hard problems” as ones that were “like finding a needle in the haystack.”

“We’ve got lots and lots of data–healthcare, business and national security,” Avent said. “All the math behind those are the same problem. We’ve gotten massive sources of data. It’s multi-variate and multi- scale. It’s spatially rich.”

In an NSA press release announcing the partnership, the agency’s director of research, Michael Wertheimer, said N.C. State is the ideal location for the new lab.

“We have chosen the Research Triangle area for its vibrant academic and industry interest in large data analytics, and N.C. State for having the nation’s first, and preeminent, advanced degree program in data analytics,” Wertheimer’s statement said. “By immersing intelligence analysts with N.C.  State’s diverse group of scientists, we hope to discover new and powerful ways to meet our foreign signals intelligence and information assurance missions – giving us an edge to better protect the nation.”

Chancellor Randy Woodson said the NSA partnership would put the University on the forefront of data analysis and a leader in analytics.

Prior to being named chancellor of N.C. State, Woodson served as provost at Purdue University. He said the collaboration with a federal agency there played a role in the growth of that institution.

“At Purdue, NASA had a big presence on campus, and if you look at research that has been done at Purdue over the years relative to aeronautical engineering and spaceflight in particular, it’s had a huge impact on the space industry,” Woodson said. “With N.C. State having such strong applied math, computer science and statistics programs, it has the potential [as Purdue with aeronautics] to have the same kind of impact on how data is managed and analyzed to promote economic growth in the country.”

Both Avent and Woodson dismissed any notion that the University will evolve into a hub of surveillance for the NSA.

“I think it’s important to understand that we’re a public university,” said Woodson. “So we’re not in the business of operational intelligence, which is one part of what the National Security Agency does, but that’s not what N.C. State will be involved in or what will go on at Centennial Campus.”