The term BIGDATA refers to the joint solicitation from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA): Solicitation NSF 12-499.

The BIGDATA solicitation aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets so as to: accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible; encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.

The phrase “big data” in this solicitation does not refer just to the volume of data, but also to its variety and velocity. Big data includes large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources.

The focus is on core scientific and technological advances (e.g., in computer science, mathematics, computational science and statistics). Proposals that focus primarily on the application of existing methods (e.g., machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis) to data sets in a specific science domain or on implementation of software tools or databases based on existing techniques are not appropriate for this solicitation.

Research Computing has been chartered by the CIO’s office to assist faculty with any BIGDATA projects or proposals. We have the facilities and expertise to make BIGDATA a reality at the University of Florida.