Education & Training

The SKA will be the biggest and most visible project in astrophysics over the next 20 years. A distributed European SKA Science Data Centre will be the natural conduit for education and outreach for the SKA across Europe, to both professional and lay audiences. The social impact of local dissemination of SKA science, in terms of education and training will be large. Radio astronomy is currently one of the most challenging applications in terms of management and exploitation of massive data sets, development of complex algorithms, and utilization of distributed computing resources. The SKA will continue down this path, providing unprecedented opportunities for high level training in data science. The ESDC will need to lead this drive in Europe, in order to satisfy its own requirements for highly trained data scientists. Naturally, many data scientists will diffuse into and out from the ESDC over its lifetime, forming a significant part of the European future data science ecosystem.