Obama Administration's Big Data Initiatives

On March 29th, 2012, Obama administration addressed the initiative called "Big Data Research and Development Initiative" that made an immediate launching of Big Data projects. It announced more than $200 million in the new commitments.

The purpose of this initiative is to

• Advance state-of-the-art core technologies regarding huge quantities of data
• Harness these technologies to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen national security, and transform teaching and learning
• Expand the workforce needed to develop and use Big Data technologies

National Science Foundation(NSF) and the National Institutes of Health(NIH)
It aims to develop core techniques and technologies for advancing Big Data science & engineering. This solicitation includes several sub-projects: interdisciplinary graduate programs; integration of machine learning; cloud computing and crowd sourcing; "EarthCube" project for geoscientists; undergraduate training programs; protein structures and biological pathways; and disciplines for how Big Data can transform teaching and learning

Department of Defense
The DoD will invest $250 million annually with $60 million available for new research projects. It includes sensing, perception, and decision support of true autonomous systems; situational awareness to help warfighters and analysts. DoD would announce a series of open prize competitions. In addition, as I mentioned in the previous post, DARPA began the XDATA program, $25 million annually.

National Institutes of Health
1,000 genomes project data are freely available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is 200 terabytes. AWS hosts the project data as a publicly available data set for free.

Department of Energy
DoE provides $25 million for the Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization Institute in order to help scientists manage and visualize data.

US Geological Survey
John Wesley Powell Center conducts the Big Data project, which would be as to climate change, earthquake recurrence rates, and the next generation of ecological indicators.

Reference: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/big_data_press_release.pdf