The cloud computing partnership between the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs) and Microsoft Research has just passed the one-year anniversary mark. In June 2016, Microsoft dedicated $3 million in cloud computing credits to support the BD Hubs and the associated Big Data Spokes (BD Spokes) projects.
The four Big Data Hubs – split by region into 
Northeast, South, Midwest, and West – apply data science resources to address regional challenges like agriculture, healthcare, and smart cities. Each Hub is partnered with a set of Spokes, multi-sector teams that focus on research themes with real world impact.
The cloud computing credits were given to the hubs as part of the Microsoft Azure for Research program, an effort that engages research and funding agencies through Azure grants and training worldwide. The BD Hubs and Spokes used the cloud computing credits to support their research projects – uses that include the aggregation and analysis of medical data, communication between cyber-physical systems as part of precision agriculture, and the publication of datasets for data science training exercises. The projects sponsored during this first year are listed in the following table[1]:
| Project | Vertical | Partner | PI name | Institution |
| Cloud computing for neuroscience research | Health | Midwest | Franco Pestilli, assistant professor | Indiana University |
| SEADTrain: Cloud-based, hands-on environment for online data science training | Education | Midwest | Beth Plale, director | Indiana University |
| Cloud infrastructure for vision-based yield mapping | Agriculture | Midwest | Volkan Isler, associate professor | University of Minnesota |
| Comprehensive and large-scale analysis of 10,000 microbiomes to better understand human disease | Health | Northeast | Chirag Patel, assistant professor | Harvard Medical School |
| Accelerating analytical workloads using GPU-CPU coprocessing | Data Sharing / Computer Science | Northeast | Sam Madden, professor Anil Shanbhag, PhD student |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Crowdsourcing platform for generating gold standard labels for medical data | Health | South | Gari Clifford, professor | Emory University |
| Proteogenomic applications of genetic variations | Genomics | West | Eric Deutsch, senior research scientist | Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle |
| Metroinsight: Smart cities as a system | Smart Cities | West | Bharathan Balaji, postdoctoral scholar | University of California, Los Angeles |
Jim Kurose, Assistant Director of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) said, “This partnership in big data and data science with Microsoft is bringing together the expertise from academia, leading-edge infrastructure and technologies from industry, and interesting datasets from the government sector to solve important problems. Microsoft’s significant contribution of cloud resources to the Big Data Hubs and Spokes effort has provided a major boost to the various Spokes projects. We are delighted to have Microsoft as a continued partner in this endeavor, and look forward to working with them, and with all of our industry partners.”
In 2016, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) collaborated with the BD Hubs on a program to support Industry-Academic Collaboration, which led to a number of successful workshops, internships, and hackathons. Stay tuned to the cccblog for information on future collaborations.
Learn more about the partnership between the BD Hubs and Microsoft and the projects it supports on the Microsoft blog.
[1] Mandava, Vani. Microsoft Research Blog. Web. 21 June 2017
