US Japan Big Data and Disaster Research | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The "US Japan Big Data and Disaster Research" opportunity (NSF Funding Opportunity Number 14-575) was a joint grant program run by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Its purpose was to fund collaborative US-Japan research that uses big data methods to significantly improve disaster management, not just at the level of individual responders or agencies, but across entire communities and societies. The program is rooted in the idea that modern disasters generate massive amounts of diverse information, and that better outcomes depend on systems-level approaches that can ingest messy, incomplete, and fast-changing data and still support effective decisions under pressure.

A central motivation for the solicitation is that disasters and disaster response behave like complex, chaotic systems. The opportunity highlights how disaster scenarios involve nonlinear behavior, strong interdependencies among many variables (for example, infrastructure, human mobility, communications availability, weather, and supply chains), multiple spatial and temporal scales happening at once, and situations where there is rarely a single "best" answer. That complexity makes both the data and the algorithms difficult: researchers have to cope with heterogeneous data sources, uncertainty, rapid shifts in conditions, and models that may be sensitive to small changes in assumptions. The solicitation also calls out additional real-world constraints that become critical during disasters, including the need to protect data security and privacy and the need for computing and communications systems that remain reliable when infrastructure is damaged or overloaded.

The opportunity was also designed to take advantage of rapid technology trends that were (and still are) reshaping the disaster data landscape. It points to new and expanding data streams coming from smartphones, tablets, edge devices, embedded and hybrid systems (including those in cars, aircraft, industrial plants, and power grids), as well as sensor networks and next-generation wireless, mobile, and cellular networking. These technologies can produce high-volume, high-velocity, and highly varied data that could improve situational awareness and forecasting, but only if researchers develop new analytics and system designs capable of operating in real time and under adverse conditions. In parallel, the solicitation recognizes that these same technologies raise hard questions about resilience: networks may fail, power may be disrupted, and devices may be unreliable, so research has to consider the robustness of the entire data-to-decision pipeline.

Within that broader framing, the NSF/JST program focused on two main research challenges. The first is capturing and processing disaster-related data to advance disaster modeling, situational analysis, and response modeling. This includes work on collecting data during crises, integrating diverse data types, cleaning and validating noisy inputs, and producing models that help understand what is happening and what actions are likely to work. The second is improving the resilience and responsiveness of emerging computer systems and networks so they can support real-time sensing, visualization, analysis, experimentation, and prediction. In practice, this theme targets the infrastructure that enables time-sensitive decision-making: computing platforms, networking, data management, and analytical workflows that must continue to function when conditions are degraded and stakes are high.

Participation required true international collaboration. Proposals submitted to NSF under this solicitation had to describe joint research with Japanese counterparts, and those Japanese partners were expected to seek their funding separately through the parallel JST solicitation. In other words, the research plan needed to be integrated across the US and Japan teams, while funding was coordinated through each country’s agency rather than a single shared award.

On the administrative side, this was a discretionary grant opportunity in the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering area (CFDA 47.070). NSF anticipated making about 8 awards, with an estimated total NSF funding level of $2,000,000 across the program. Cost sharing was not required. Eligibility on the US side was limited to academic institutions: accredited US universities and colleges (including two- and four-year institutions and community colleges) with a US campus, applying on behalf of their faculty. The solicitation was posted June 9, 2014, with a full proposal deadline of September 8, 2014, and it was archived October 8, 2014.

Overall, the program can be summarized as a targeted NSF-JST effort to push forward the science and engineering needed to make disaster management smarter, faster, and more reliable, by combining big data analytics with resilient computing and networking, and by grounding that work in coordinated US-Japan research teams.

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