NIH has issued their “Big Data to Knowledge” (BD2K) Funding Opportunity announcement (FOA) (RFA-CA-15-017) seeking development of software tools and methods in three topic areas including data privacy, data repurposing, and applying metadata which are all part of the overall BD2K initiative. NIH intends to fund about 8 to 12 awards, totaling $5 million for FY 2016.
Biomedical research is rapidly becoming more data intensive as investigators are generating and using increasingly large, complex, multidimensional, and diverse datasets. The era of big data in biomedical research hinders many researchers in their ability to release, locate, analyze, and interact with the data and associated software. This is due to the lack of tools, accessibility, and training available to researchers.
There is the need to protect data provided by human participants, but there is also privacy challenges on how to separate dataset when combined and how the information content is to be stored on device systems.
The data that is being generated through mobile health, social networking, wearable devices, etc., can be integrated with more traditional health related data to build novel insights into improving health. This is challenging for biomedical research since it is difficult to integrate the data while preserving privacy.
Data repurposing refers to the use and application of the data that was not originally created for research purposes. This can include biomedical and health relevant data collected for purposes of medical care, environmental monitoring data, or quantified-self data.
Software is also needed to apply metadata which refers to tools and methods that help researchers submit data and materials to databases, journals, and other common resources shared by the community by helping them to annotate their data, apply metadata and enable data interoperability.
Eligible applicants can include higher education institutions, nonprofits, for-profits that can include small businesses, and government. Applications are due October 6, 2015.
Go to http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-CA-15-017.html to view the announcement posted on July, 2015.