NSF Teams with Private Cloud Providers to Beef up BIGDATA Awards

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:

For more information, visit nsf.gov.

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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