NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on Monday featured an hour-long discussion among several thought leaders — titled “The New World of Massive Data Mining” — about the Federal government’s new Big Data R&D Initiative: Every time you go on the Internet, make a phone call, send an email, pass a traffic camera or pay a bill, you create [electronic data]. In all, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. This massive pile of information from all sources is called “Big Data.” It gets stored somewhere, and everyday the pile gets bigger. Government and industry are finding new ways to analyze it. Last week the administration announced an initiative to aid the development of Big Data […]

Our colleagues over at IEEE have published a great piece by G. Pascal Zachary, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, opining on the legacy of recently-departed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan: The most famous name in American innovation today isn’t Apple or Google. Nor is it Facebook, Boeing, or Intel.   The iconic American innovator is a government agency that neither earns a profit nor sells a single consumer product. That DARPA … runs with the big dogs of commercial innovation reflects the importance of science and technology to national security. War, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
..   Since its inception as the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late […]

Calling all developers! Late this afternoon, the White House and Department of Labor announced the Summer Jobs+ Code Sprint, “challenging the developer community to build apps that reach kids throughout the nation on their browsers, Facebook, Android, iOS, SMS or any other platform.” The Labor Department released an API that opens access to thousands of summer internship, mentorship, and other training opportunities through the Summer Jobs+ Bank — which seeks to provide low-income and disconnected youth access to these opportunities. This is the first ever White House Code Sprint and we’re excited to see what innovative apps you build over the next seven days. There is no ideal app, but keep in mind that our […]

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 […]