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Obama Administration Places $200 Million Bet On Big Data

Posted by samzenpus on from the always-bet-on-greenbacks dept.

wiredmikey writes "As the Federal Government aims to make use of the massive volume of digital data being generated on a daily basis, the Obama Administration today announced a 'Big Data Research and Development Initiative' backed by more than $200 million in commitments to start. Through the new Big Data initiative and associated monetary investments, the Obama Administration promises to greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data. Interestingly, as part of a number of government announcements on big data today, The National Institutes of Health announced that the world's largest set of data on human genetic variation – produced by the international 1000 Genomes Project (At 200 terabytes so far) is now freely available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Additionally, the Department of Defense (DoD) said it would invest approximately $250 million annually across the Military Departments in a series of programs. 'We also want to challenge industry, research universities, and non-profits to join with the Administration to make the most of the opportunities created by Big Data,' Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy at OSTP noted in a blog post. 'Clearly, the government can't do this on its own. We need what the President calls an 'all hands on deck' effort.'"

5 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Great QOTD by smwny · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The QOTD at the bottom of the page so perfectly matched this story.

    All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. -- Jim Fiebig

  2. Privacy? by GeneralTurgidson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When it comes to big data, there's going to be little privacy.

  3. Doesn't this bother anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Clearly, the government can't do this on its own. We need what the President calls an 'all hands on deck' effort

    So the Obama wants to pick and choose how this will be handled but he wants everyone else to do it? Whatever happened to representation?

    1. Re:Doesn't this bother anyone? by LandoCalrizzian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm black, and I think that even if Obama is "my nigga", he cannot be trusted, and he betrayed most of those who voted for him with all his false promises.

      I intend to vote against "my nigga" next time.

      I guess you can call me an Uncle Tom, but I'd rather be called that than be called a sucker or an idiot.

      Posting as AC and talking about trust is an irony in itself. Anyone naive enough to think that the President can drastically change the way a nation works in 4 years is a sucker and an idiot. Government is slow to work and slow to react because it is run by a committee of people who have their own agenda that doesn't always align with the President's agenda. It doesn't matter who is in office, if the kids can't play nice then nothing gets done. Let's set the record straight, a President has the least control on how a nation is run, the body of Congress has most of the power. If you want one man to run the country move to Syria. If you want change, you should be more selective of your Congressional representatives instead of only paying attention to 2 people for ~6 months every 4 years.

  4. Right investment, right time by macwhizkid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm a hard science/computer science guy who's livelihood is working on various NIH/NSF projects. A common thread talking to other scientists the past few years has been the theme that the tools for data analysis have not kept pace with the tools for data acquisition. Companies like National Instruments sell sub-$1000 USB DAQ boards with resolution and bandwidth that would make a scientist from the early 1990's weep for joy. But most data analysis is done the same way it's been done since that same era: with a desktop application working with discrete files, and maybe some ad-hoc scripts. (Only now the scripts are Python instead of C...)

    The funny thing is, most researchers haven't yet wrapped their brains around the notion of offloading data onto cloud computing solutions like Amazon AWS. I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.