Earlier this month, Gil Press of Forbes wrote A Very Short History Of Big Data.  The history in this article begins in 1944, but jumps every few years until 2008, when it seems Big Data hit the big time.

The impact of efforts by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in that time frame were noted by Forbes, as they had previously been by the New York Times.  Both highlighted a CCC white paper co-authored by Randal Bryant (CMU), Randy Katz (UC Berkeley), and Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science, and Society.”

Big Data has been a major theme of CCC’s over the years.  Also in 2008, led by Bryant, CCC held two events for Big Data that coalesced the research community and the usage community.  A number of CCC’s white papers focused on the topic.  These have been credited by OSTP with helping to shape the Federal Big Data Initiative, now in its second year.  New programs continue to be launched under that initiative from different agencies as described in this post.  The White House hosted a Big Data Workshop on May 3, 2013.  The workshop was sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the NITRD Big Data Senior Steering Group.  The White House will be hosting more workshops in the fall to introduce new partnerships between industry and academia around Big Data.  The CCC will host additional workshops for the research community around Big Data to help inform the White House events.