Late last month, the Administration unveiled a $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative, committing new funding to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The initiative includes a joint solicitation by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), providing up to $25 million for Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA). Now NSF and NIH have announced a webinar “to describe the goals and focus of the BIGDATA solicitation, help investigators understand its scope, and answer any questions potential Principal Investigators (PIs) may have.” The webinar will take place next week — on Tuesday, May 8th, from 11am to 12pm ET.

According to the NSF and NIH (following the link):

The BIGDATA solicitation aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets so as to: accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible; encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.

 

The phrase “big data” in this solicitation does not refer just to the volume of data, but also to its variety and velocity. Big data includes large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources.

 

The focus is on core scientific and technological advances (e.g., in computer science, mathematics, computational science and statistics). Proposals that focus primarily on the application of existing methods (e.g., machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis) to data sets in a specific science domain or on implementation of software tools or databases based on existing techniques are not appropriate for this solicitation.

Registration for the May 8th webinar is open until 11:59pm PDT on Monday, May 7th. Questions about the solicitation may be e-mailed to bigdata@nsf.gov before or during the webinar.

To learn more, check out the BIGDATA solicitation here or, for NIH-specific details, see a NIH announcement here.

And be sure to read our previous coverage about the Big Data R&D Initiative.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)