White House OSTP "Big Data" Initiative Includes Opportunities for Statistics

By Steve Pierson posted 03-30-2012 14:58

  
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) led a roll-out of a an Obama Administration Big Data initiative yesterday. The heads of OSTP, NSF, NIH, USGS, DARPA, DOE Office of Science, and DOD R&D laid out the initiative, which includes $200 million in new R&D investments to a packed AAAS auditorium.

While statistics was not mentioned prominently in the roll-out, there are opportunities for statisticians in the Big Data initiative, especially at the NSF. Specifically, the NSF Big Data press release announced
  • "a $1.4 million award for a focused research group that brings together statisticians and biologists to develop network models and automatic, scalable algorithms and tools to determine protein structures and biological pathways," and
  • "a solicitation, 'Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering, or 'Big Data,' jointly with NIH.  This program aims to extract and use knowledge from collections of large data sets in order to accelerate progress in science and engineering research. Specifically, it will fund research to develop and evaluate new algorithms, statistical methods, technologies, and tools for improved data collection and management, data analytics and e-science collaboration environments."
Addressing work force needs, NSF included
  • "$2 million award for a research training group in big data will support training for undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral fellows to use statistical, graphical and visualization techniques for complex data."
More on three of the new NSF Big Data programs can be viewed at:
The other Big Data initiatives that mention statistical tools/techniques or analytics in the OSTP Big Data Fact Sheet are the following:
  • DOE: "Mathematics for Analysis of Petascale Data addresses the mathematical challenges of extracting insights from huge scientific datasets and finding key features and understanding the relationships between those features. Research areas include machine learning, real-time analysis of streaming data, stochastic nonlinear data-reduction techniques and scalable statistical analysis techniques applicable to a broad range of DOE applications including sensor data from the electric grid, cosmology and climate data."
  • FDA: "A Virtual Laboratory Environment (VLE) will combine existing resources and capabilities to enable a virtual laboratory data network, advanced analytical and statistical tools and capabilities, crowd sourcing of analytics to predict and promote public health, document management support, tele-presence capability to enable worldwide collaboration, and basically make any location a virtual laboratory with advanced capabilities in a matter of hours.
  • DHS: "The Center of Excellence on Visualization and Data Analytics (CVADA), a collaboration among researchers at Rutgers University and Purdue University (with three additional partner universities each) leads research efforts on large, heterogeneous data that First Responders could use to address issues ranging from manmade or natural disasters to terrorist incidents; law enforcement to border security concerns; and explosives to cyber threats."
Zach Lemnios, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering at the U.S. Department of Defense mentioned analytics in his remarks (See 26:30 of the video) about the DOD placing a "placing a Big Bet on Big Data" through their Data to Decisions program: "We see a revolution emerging in harnessing and utilizing massive data in very new ways through data analytics and prognosis."

If you have thoughts or suggestions for the role of statisticians and/or ASA please visit: Big Data and the Role of Statistics.

For more information on the programs, see the following links:
Here is a sampling of the press/blog coverage:



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