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The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

White House to Announce Big Data R&D Initiative Thursday;
Live Webcast Planned

March 27th, 2012 / in big science, CCC, policy, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here.

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The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and Department of Defense (DoD), including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will hold an event in Washington, DC, this Thursday addressing the challenges and opportunities relating to “Big Data.” The event will be webcast live from 2:00pm to 3:30pm EDT.

According to the media advisory:

Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large and complicated data sets commonly referred to as “Big Data.” A wealth of information may be found within these sets with enormous potential to shed light on some of the toughest and most pressing challenges facing the nation. To capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to extract insights and make new connections across disciplines we need better tools and programs to access, store, search, visualize and analyze these data.

To maximize this historic opportunity — and in support of recommendations from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — the Obama Administration is launching a Big Data Research and Development Initiative, coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and supported by several federal departments and agencies.

Among the speakers (after the jump):

John Holdren, Assistant to the President and Director, OSTP;
Subra Suresh, Director, NSF;
Francis Collins, Director, NIH;
Marcia McNutt, Director, USGS;
Zach Lemnios, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering [ASD(R&E)], DoD;
Kaigham “Ken” Gabriel, Acting Director, DARPA; and
William Brinkman, Director, DoE Office of Science.

In addition, there will be a panel of thought leaders from academia and industry, to be moderated by New York Times’ technology writer Steve Lohr.

We’ll have complete coverage of this event on Thursday afternoon.

In the meantime, read a series of white papers describing challenges and opportunities in “big data” in the context of several national priority areas, including health, energy, transportation, national defense, education, etc., prepared by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) over the past couple years.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)