As we’ve covered extensively, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with six Federal agencies, rolled out the Big Data R&D Initiative on Thursday afternoon, providing $200 million in funding to improve our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data. Highlights included a $25 million solicitation supporting foundational research, including core techniques and technologies, spanning all directorates and offices within the National Science Foundation (NSF) and 7 institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); a $250 million “Data to Decisions” investment by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering [ASD(R&E)], constituting a major push in data to decision, autonomy, and human systems; and a […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) The Obama Administration this morning unveiled details about its Big Data R&D Initiative, committing more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The effort, spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), seeks to “advance state-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data; harness these technologies to accelerate […]

Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** As we noted on Tuesday, the Obama Administration is announcing a new, multi-agency Big Data R&D Initiative today. An event — to be streamed live via the web — is scheduled for 2pm EDT. New York Times’ technology writer Steve Lohr has the early details in today’s paper: The federal government is beginning a major research initiative in big data computing. The effort, which will be announced on Thursday, involves several government agencies and departments, and commitments for the programs total $200 million.   Administration officials compare the initiative to past government research […]

Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and Department of Defense (DoD), including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will hold an event in Washington, DC, this Thursday addressing the challenges and opportunities relating to “Big Data.” The event will be webcast live from 2:00pm to 3:30pm EDT. According to the media advisory: Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large and complicated data sets […]

Today’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Science Nation features the work of Amy McGovern, an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, whose data mining and predictive modeling approaches are transforming the way we predict tornadoes. According to the article: Tornadoes claim hundreds of lives and cause billions of dollars in damages in the United States. But the tornado outbreak across the South on April 27, 2011, was startling, even for veteran forecasters such as Greg Carbin at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Okla.   “Through the 24-hour loop here, almost 200 tornadoes had occurred in […]

We’ve previously described in this space the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) — a $100 million initiative announced last June to drastically accelerate the discovery, development, and manufacturing of new and advanced materials — describing the critical role to be played by the computer and information sciences and engineering research community, including via predictive modeling, simulation, and visualization capabilities. Now there’s an interesting news focus (subscription required) in this week’s Science, noting, “Supercomputing power now makes it possible to compute the properties of thousands of crystalline materials in a flash and is expected to guide experimentalists where to search for the next best things.” According to the article (following the link):