Relevant initiatives from today's Big Data press release

An exciting day for Big Data (particularly if your Berkeley).

NSF

  • Encouraging research universities to develop interdisciplinary graduate programs to prepare the next generation of data scientists and engineers;
  • Funding a $10 million Expeditions in Computing project based at the University of California, Berkeley, that will integrate three powerful approaches for turning data into information - machine learning, cloud computing, and crowd sourcing;
  • Providing the first round of grants to support “EarthCube” - a system that will allow geoscientists to access, analyze and share information about our planet;
  • Convening researchers across disciplines to determine how Big Data can transform teaching and learning.

DOE

The Department of Energy will provide $25 million in funding to establish the Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. Led by the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,

DoD

  • The Department is seeking a 100-fold increase in the ability of analysts to extract information from texts in any language.
  • The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is beginning the XDATA program, which intends to invest approximately $25 million annually for four years to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of data. The XDATA program will support open source software toolkits to enable flexible software development for users to process large volumes of data in timelines commensurate with mission workflows of targeted defense applications.

USGS

USGS is announcing the latest awardees for grants it issues through its John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis. The Center catalyzes innovative thinking in Earth system science by providing scientists a place and time for in-depth analysis, state-of-the-art computing capabilities, and collaborative tools invaluable for making sense of huge data sets. These Big Data projects will improve our understanding of issues such as species response to climate change, earthquake recurrence rates, and the next generation of ecological indicators.

NSF’s email alerts today reflect this initiative with more details: