Highlights of the White House BigData Research Initiative

Yesterday’s announcement included a few main highlights:

• NIH will make 200TB of human genetic variation data freely available on Amazon Web Services
• NSF will provide $2M in support of undergraduate education for studying graphical and visualization techniques of bigdata
• DoD will announce some prize competitions in the coming months
• Numerous other projects to increase data analysis across the US Government

Here is one note I did find interesting (or funny).  One of the speakers mentioned the need for workers with bigdata skills.  He mentioned the workforce needs 159,000 workers with data skills.  Then a couple minutes later he mention a need for data savvy managers.  He mentioned the workforce will need 1,500,000 managers with data knowledge.   I just thought those 2 numbers did not match up well.

Here are a few more links to other articles summarizing the Research Initiative:

• Wall Street Journal
• CNET
• PC World