The Arizona State University Library is opening a new center for data science and research collaboration. The center launches this week and will be open to a variety of ideas and research projects.

ASU will host a series of open-house events for students and faculty to gauge interest and raise awareness about the new library lab.

Director of Data Science and Analytics Michael Simeone said they work on projects related to anything from art history to facility maintenance.

“We’re not picky about the topic of the research,” Simeone said. “We’re more interested in making sure that in any of these situations, we’re using things like statistics and machine learning or even date visualization to get knowledge out of data.”

Simeone said the center will match students with similar interests and he hopes they’ll be able to use data science to grow those interests.

“We hope that when they participate in any of the projects that either they envision or that we envision, that they’re not limited to thinking about data science in just an industrial application or seeing it only in terms of what companies like Amazon and Netflix have used data science for,” Simeone said.