Funding & Grants

NSF Teams with Private Cloud Providers to Beef up BIGDATA Awards

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 02/09/18

The National Science Foundation is partnering with cloud providers on its Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) program in an effort to encourage projects that focus on large-scale experimentation and scalability.

BIGDATA supports research in fields such as mathematics, computational science, statistics and computer science that advance data science, as well as projects that leverage data science to advance knowledge in other disciplines, such as education, engineering or behavioral sciences.

The NSF is offering $30 million in grants through the program, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure have committed up to $3 million each over three years to support relevant projects with credits for cloud-based storage and computing.

"NSF's collaboration with the technology industry through BIGDATA is vital, especially in the area of data science," according to a news release. "In its first year, this collaboration is driving creative and principled approaches to address data management, modeling, and analysis of big data, and applying novel techniques to solve data-intensive domain science and engineering problems. Furthermore, NSF is actively seeking to expand this collaboration through a recently released dear colleague letter."

Examples of this year's BIGDATA awards, two of which include cloud credit awards, are:

• University of California, Berkeley's Scalable and Interpretable Machine Learning: Bridging Mechanistic and Data-Driven Modeling in the Biological Sciences, which looks to develop " novel, scalable, statistical machine learning algorithms that can effectively guide human decision-making and discovery in biological systems," according to information released by NSF;
• Predictive Analytics of Driver's Engagement for Injury Prevention, a collaborative project between Drexel University, Virginia Tech and the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, that will research predictive analytics regarding driver disengagement in an attempt to create alerts to reduce driving accidents; and
• Foundations of Responsible Data Management, a joint project of Drexel University, University of Washington, University of Michigan and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that will explore responsible data management, including ideas such as  "representativeness and diversity, transparency and accountability, and data protection," throughout the data lifecycle, from discovery through analysis, according to an NSF news release.

For more information, visit nsf.gov.