A Big Data Innovation Hub for the Western United States
PI: Michael L. Norman, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego
co-PI: Christine Kirkpatrick, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego
co-PI: Erin Robinson, Federation for Earth Sciences
PI: Mike Franklin, UC Berkeley
PI: Ed Lazowska, University of Washington
co-PI: Bill Howe
co-PI: Ariel Rokem
Overview: The West Big Data Innovation Hub links people representing programs and institutions with a stake and resources to share in a Big Data Innovation Network. Resources include: data, infrastructure, expertise, tools, training, and applications; the driving reasons for collaboration include research needs, societal needs, business interests and solutions and information sharing activities. Specific regional challenges and opportunities will shape the Hub’s purpose: to facilitate strong interactions among the West’s Big Data technology industry and resource and partner organizations that can effectively apply solutions to address the issues. Through the Hub, Big Data resource providers, state and regional connector organizations, academic centers of excellence, companies, state agencies, and non-profits can collaborate to leverage the potential for Big Data approaches to transform or lend value to their operations. The Hub will develop a shared vision and action agenda around five thematic areas: Big Data technology (cross cutting), data-enabled scientific discovery and learning (cross cutting), managing natural resources and hazards, metro data science, and precision medicine. The Hub will develop and deploy a decision-making process that is effective and designed to foster an optimal level of engagement. Sustainability and scalability will be explored via industry membership and training activities. The Hub will provide facilitation and leadership for coordination of research activities; sharing best practices; and formation of new partnerships.
Intellectual Merit: The massive scalability, pay-as-you-go, elastic resources, flexible data description, multiple access modalities and open source development characteristics of Big Data technologies together create a new landscape for data management (including the identification and/or creation of data repositories in the thematic areas) that contains both opportunities and calls for innovation in hardware, software, communications, data management, applications and domain science. Rapid advances in our ability to acquire and generate data are enabling a scientific discovery revolution of concern for every area of the NSF; it will greatly impact engineering, and the life, social and physical sciences and unite them with computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. The Hub will capitalize on this confluence of opportunities. The Hub has the potential to improve the flow of commercial technologies into universities in ways that maximize competitiveness, and vice versa: the Hub will expand the impact of university technologies by putting them into practice, via start-ups or external adoption. This synergy is a particular strength of the West.
Broader Impacts of the Proposed Work: Partnerships fostered through the Hub will (i) focus on development and application of Big Data technologies, data standards, relevant policies and ethics, and innovative data intensive discovery techniques; (ii) leverage these to transform how data are collected, integrated, stored, analyzed, and shared with the aim of assessing risks related to regional and long-term decisions. The Hub will be impactful by enabling communication and raising awareness of the interdependencies between stakeholder groups brought together through Hub activities. The Hub will develop new networks of impact by building upon programs and mechanisms of the membership, designed to connect researchers with businesses, industry, municipalities, and government. Through the enrichment of partner institutions’ curricula with data, challenges, use cases, and tools from focus domains, the Hub will provide cross-discipline, data-intensive context influencing the next generation of thought leaders and data scientists. The partnerships enabled by the Hub will lead to professional certificate programs and student internships, creating a pipeline of graduates from partner institutions to impact corporations, public and governmental agencies, national labs, resource-planning agencies, and regulatory commissions.