Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative Request for Applications

July 29th, 2015 / in Announcements, policy, Research News / by Helen Wright

bd2k_logo

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative (BD2K) has announced the release of an Request for Applications (RFA) for software and methods development in biomedical big data science: “Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01)“.

This opportunity targets three topic areas of high need for researchers working with biomedical Big Data:

Data privacy is one of the fundamental challenges of our age. To take full advantage of the power of big data to drive biomedical discovery, researchers must work with data from disparate sources and with differing privacy policies and protections. How do we integrate biomedical data while preserving privacy? Innovation in data privacy methods is essential.


Data repurposing
is indispensable to the future of biomedical science. This area includes both the re-use of biomedical data that was collected for another purpose and the application of non-biomedical data types to solve biomedical questions. Both economical and innovative, data repurposing opens new lines of research, but presents significant challenges in suitable integration and analysis of combined datasets. New methods and tools are needed to allow widespread application of data repurposing practices.


Applying metadata
is necessary to permit the re-use of biomedical data. Software for metadata application and data annotation relieves researchers from some of the labor-intensive and confusing requirement for data sharing. By enabling researchers to more readily submit datasets to common resources and repositories, methods and tools for applying metadata support data interoperability.

The receipt deadline for applications is October 6, 2015, with an optional letter of intent due September 6, 2015.

BD2K is a trans-NIH initiative that aims to support advances in data science, other quantitative sciences, policy, and training that are needed for the effective use of big data in biomedical research. Interested applicants are encouraged to join the BD2K listserv to receive the most up-to-date information about BD2K events and funding opportunities.

For more information, please see the BD2K website.

NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative Request for Applications

Comments are closed.