Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science Engineering | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) is a National Science Foundation-led grant opportunity, developed in coordination with the National Institutes of Health, that targets the foundational research needed to make large-scale data genuinely useful. The program is centered on the idea that modern science, engineering, and biomedicine are being reshaped by massive volumes of complex data coming from everywhere: scientific instruments and sensors, high-resolution imaging, genomic platforms, online transactions, email, video, clickstreams, and other digital sources that are only growing in scale and variety. The solicitation treats "big data" broadly, emphasizing not only size but also diversity, complexity, heterogeneity, distribution across systems, and longitudinal data collected over time. The core aim is to strengthen the underlying techniques and technologies that allow researchers to manage, analyze, visualize, and extract actionable information from these kinds of data sets.

The opportunity is designed to accelerate discovery and innovation by pushing forward the methods that turn raw data into knowledge and then into decisions and actions. In practical terms, it seeks new statistical and mathematical approaches, novel machine learning and data mining methods, improved predictive modeling, and more effective visualization and human-data interaction techniques that can operate at the scale and speed modern data requires. The solicitation also explicitly values multidisciplinary approaches, recognizing that breakthroughs often come when domain experts work alongside computer scientists, statisticians, engineers, and social or behavioral scientists to rethink how data is collected, processed, shared, and interpreted. A major theme is that data-intensive approaches are not just incremental improvements to traditional hypothesis testing and inference; they are enabling new kinds of questions to be asked, new fields of inquiry to form, and new forms of evidence-driven decision making, including clinical decision making in health contexts.

Another central priority is infrastructure, not just in the sense of hardware, but in creating scalable, accessible, and sustainable data ecosystems. That includes tools, platforms, and practices for storing and curating data, enabling efficient computation across distributed resources, and supporting data sharing and reuse in ways that preserve privacy, security, provenance, and long-term utility. The solicitation frames these investments as national capacity building: the outputs are expected to produce reusable knowledge, software, algorithms, workflows, and infrastructure components that can be adopted by many communities rather than remaining one-off solutions. The broader impacts the program points to are wide-ranging, including enabling advances in science and engineering, improving health and quality of life, supporting economic growth, strengthening national security applications, and helping sustain long-run US competitiveness.

BIGDATA is also positioned as one piece of a longer-term federal strategy to tackle national big data challenges. The solicitation highlights complementary efforts such as big data infrastructure projects across scientific and biomedical communities, education and workforce development to train people who can work effectively in data-intensive environments, and integrative programs that support multi-institutional and multidisciplinary collaboration on complex grand challenge problems. It references the broader "data to knowledge to action" pipeline emphasized in national planning discussions, underscoring that the goal is not simply to generate more data, but to create reliable pathways from data to insight to real-world outcomes.

From an administrative standpoint, this opportunity is a discretionary funding program using a cooperative agreement mechanism, reflecting an expectation of active engagement between the funding agency and awardees. The estimated total funding is about $25 million with an anticipated 20 awards. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted, meaning it is broadly open to applicant types, subject to any specific constraints described in the full solicitation text. The program spans a wide range of research domains, reflected in the many CFDA program areas associated with it, including NSF directorates such as Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Geosciences, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Biological Sciences, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, Education and Human Resources, Polar Programs, and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, along with multiple NIH-related program areas touching genomics, neuroscience, cancer biology, drug abuse and addiction research, biomedical research and training, and medical library assistance. The posting date is March 30, 2012, with proposal deadlines in mid-2012 (including distinct due dates for mid-scale and small projects), and the opportunity is now archived.

Overall, the BIGDATA solicitation is best understood as a foundational research and capability-building program: it is not limited to any single application area, but instead aims to create core methods, tools, and infrastructure that many domains can use to make large, complex, and distributed data sets more trustworthy, more interpretable, more shareable, and ultimately more useful for discovery, innovation, and decision making at scale.

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