7 Big Winners in the U.S. Big Data Drive by Nicole Hemsoth.
As we pointed out in Big Data is a Big Deal, the U.S. government is ponying up $200 million in new data projects.
Nicole covers seven projects that are of particular interest:
- DARPA’s XDATA – See XDATA for details – Closes May 30, 2012.
- SDAV Institute (DOE) – SDAV: Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization (has a toolkit and other resources I need to cover separately)
- Biological and Environmental Research Program (BER) has created the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. Lots of data.
- John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis (USGS). Data + tools.
- PURVAC Purdue University – Homeland Security
- Biosense 2.0 – CDC project
- Machine Reading (DARPA) – usual goals:
developing learning systems that process natural text and insert the resulting semantic representation into a knowledge bases rather than relying on expensive and time-consuming current processes for knowledge representation that require expert and associated knowledge engineers to hand-craft information.
I suppose one lesson to be learned is how quickly the bulk of $200 million can be sucked up by current projects.
The second lesson is to become an ongoing (large ongoing) research project so that you too can suck up new funding.
The third lesson is to use these ostensible goals of these projects as actual goals for your projects. The difference between trying to reach a goal and reaching it may make a difference.