La Serena School for Data Science: A balance of an international formative program spanning over 10 years

The volume and complexity of astronomical data continues to grow as the current generation of surveys come online (PanSTARRS, Gaia, Dark Energy Survey, VISTA). Astronomers will need to work with giga, tera and even petabytes of data in real time (LSST). This poses the challenges of developing and using new tools for data discovery, access, and analysis. At the same time, there are new opportunities for interdisciplinary research in applied mathematics, statistics, machine learning, crowd-sourcing, etc.
Astronomy provides a sand-box where scientists can come together from diverse fields to address common challenges within the “Big Data” paradigm. In response, the AURA-O/NOIRLab together with other Chilean organizations such as the Universidad de La Serena and Universidad de Chile, have implemented the “La Serena School for Data Science: Tools for Data-Driven Sciences". In this contribution we present our initiative, which is developed annually at the AURA campus in La Serena, Chile.