There have been several inter-related announcements dealing with "Big Data" this week that I think will be of interest to many CNI-announce readers; my apologies for being tardy in sharing them.

On Tuesday, November 12, the Obama Administration hosted an event under the auspices of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Networking and Information Technology R&D program coordinating office titled "Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships" which provides a progress report on the big data initiative first announced in March 2012. The agenda, and more importantly several very useful background documents, can be found here:

http://www.nitrd.gov/nitrdgroups/index.php?title=Data_to_Knowledge_to_Action

In conjunction with this event, NSF also issued a press release that summarized their progress in supporting the initiative, with many links to descriptions of specific projects and programs. The overview release can be found at:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=129244&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

The November 12 event was webcast live; there are links to recorded video of at least some of the sessions included in the NSF press release above (see the right hand margin of the page).

Also at the November 12 event,  we  saw the announcement of a large-scale, 5-year multi-institutional partnership funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation focused on the use of big data and data science to advance basic research and scientific discovery. The participating institutions are New York University, the University of Washington, and the University of California, Berkeley.  This page from the Moore Foundation provides an overview and links to a number of related press releases:

http://www.moore.org/programs/science/data-driven-discovery/data-science-environments

and here is the Sloan Foundation (joint) press release

http://www.sloan.org/fileadmin/media/files/press_releases/datascience.pdf

and here is the announcement from UC Berkeley

http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/datascience/overview-data-science

from NYU

http://datascience.nyu.edu/new-york-university-to-collaborate-on-multi-million-dollar-initiative-to-harness-potential-of-data-scientists-and-big-data/

and from the University of Washington

http://escience.washington.edu/blog/uw-berkeley-nyu-collaborate-378m-data-science-initiative

Exciting times.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI