Today the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announces the launch of an Industry-Academic Collaboration with the partnership of the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs).

The goal of this program is to catalyze and foster partnerships between industry and academic research by creating mechanisms for early career researchers in academia and industry representatives to interact and to explore ways to work together. This program would enable shared learning and perspectives, access to problems and data, career training, and opportunities for long term partnerships.

The Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs are a set of four groups divided by region; Midwest, West, South and North East sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) as part of their continued leadership in the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative.

For the Industry-Academic Collaboration program, each Hub is tasked with creating a plan that is aligned with their region’s needs and opportunities to foster partnerships between early career researchers and industry, and which will benefit the Innovation Hub. The plan should focus on early career researchers, include metrics for success, and articulate how it will create long-term partnerships that persist beyond the initial activities. Possible activities are workshops, faculty internships, student internships, site visits, hackathons, and lecture series.

The awards will be for up to $300,000 and must be spent by September 30, 2016. Proposals from each Hub are due to cccinfo@cra.org by January 29, 2016. Proposals should be no more than 6 pages.

To learn more about the awards and the Industry-Academic Collaboration program visit the program webpage.