Big Data Grants

Scott Kirkpatrick from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sent me the following. It seems that Obama's administration have allocated 200M $ NSF grant for big data analysis:

The Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA) solicitation aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing,  analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets so as to: accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible; encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.

You can read more here.

Mike Draugelis, a strategic planning manager from Lockheed Martin, send me another related DARPA grant:

The XDATA program seeks to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of data, both semi-structured (e.g., tabular, relational, categorical, meta-data) and unstructured (e.g., text documents, message traffic).  Central challenges to be addressed include a) developing scalable algorithms for processing imperfect data in distributed data stores, and b) creating effective human-computer interaction tools for facilitating rapidly customizable visual reasoning for diverse missions.

The program envisions open source software toolkits that enable flexible software
development supporting users processing large volumes of data in timelines commensurate with mission workflows of targeted defense applications. 

The full details are here.