The National Science Foundation (NSF) www.nsf.gov announced that four awards totaling more than $5 million will be used to establish four regional hubs for data science innovation. These hubs will be referred to as “Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs” or BD Hubs https://bdhub.info.
The BD Hubs will be established in four regions in the U.S to include data scientists from Columbia University (Northeast Hub), Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina (South Hub), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Midwest Hub) and the University of California, San Diego, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington (West Hub).
The award amount for the regions includes:
- Northeast Hub $1,250,000
- South Hub $625,594
- Midwest Hub $1,250,000
- West Hub funding for $302,733
The big data brain trust assembled by the hubs will conceive, plan, and support partnerships and activities to address regional challenges. The benefits of the hub program will enable greater ease in initiating partnerships by reducing coordination costs, create opportunities for sharing ideas, resources, and best practices that will enable top talent to address important issues.
BD Hubs priorities are to develop new technologies for big data retrieval involving healthcare issues, local health disparities, ideas pertaining to smart and connected communities, which will greatly contribute to research into precision medicine. Scientists will also apply big data to study management of natural resources, manufacturing, and finance.
In addition to the BD Hubs, NSF recently announced the release of a new solicitation for the BD Spoke Initiative. Each BD Spoke will focus on a specific BD Hub priority area to address access to data, automating the data lifecycle, and how to apply data science techniques to solve other scientific problems. NSF anticipates awarding $10 million in grants for the BD Spokes program, which will be contingent upon the availability of funds.
For more information on the program, email Fen Zhao at fzhao@nsf.gov.