NSF Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH)
NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) initiated the National Network of Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs) program in FY 2015. Four BD Hubs – Midwest, Northeast, South, and West – were established to foster multi-sector collaborations among academia, industry, and government, both nationally and internationally. These BD Hubs are serving a convening and coordinating role by bringing together a wide range of Big Data stakeholders in order to connect solution seekers with solution providers. There are 11 MBDH teams that have been created around the initial themes and activity areas for the Midwest BD Hub.
Last week was a conference held at Ames, Iowa for the Digital Agriculture Spoke of the Midwest Big Data Hub, a diverse network of partners that responds to Big Data challenges unique to the Midwest. There was good UNL participation in Ames and will be even greater numbers at upcoming MBDH meetings coming to Omaha. COE faculty with interest in Big Data-related activities are encouraged to participate through one or more of the mechanisms described below. https://twitter.com/MWBigDataHub?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fmidwestbigdatahub.org%2Fspoke-awards%2F.
The Digital Agriculture Spoke -- https://digital.ag.iastate.edu -- of the Midwest Big Data Hub -- http://midwestbigdatahub.org -- seeks to organize academic, industrial, and governmental sectors around the development of policies and best practices for data science and Big Data applications in agriculture, with a particular focus on automating the Big Data lifecycle for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and for plant sciences, phenomics, and genomics.
An expected outcome is improved and efficient use of UAS, imaging, and genomics in agricultural sciences, ultimately leading to a more sustainable global food and nutrition system. Coordination of these activities will be enhanced through this Digital Agriculture open web portal of data science resources, designed to integrate existing information silos, facilitate collaboration, and contribute to workforce development. Educational activities and tools will be leveraged from pre-existing traineeship programs and collaborative entities, and broadened with newly developed annual workshops. Special issue-teams of academic, industrial, and governmental representatives will be used to conduct deep-learning analysis of project educational activities to identify and refine mechanisms for broadening and diversifying participation. The Digital Ag community can be found here: https://digitalag.org/community.php
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Locally at the university is the Plant Phenomics Phridays Fall seminar series https://twitter.com/MWBigDataHub?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fmidwestbigdatahub.org%2Fspoke-awards%2F. This group is holding meet-ups: https://www.meetup.com/Nebraska-UAS-Precision-Agriculture-and-Big-Data-Meetup/members/
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Next up is the MBDH All-Hands Meeting October 2-3 in Omaha. Additional activities -- http://midwestbigdatahub.org/2017-mbdh-all-hands-meeting-colocated-activities/ -- take place October 1, 4 and 5.
http://midwestbigdatahub.org/2017-all-hands-meeting/
The MBDH All-Hands meetings are organized annually to bring together the broad MBDH membership and interested new parties to share information on data and Data Science-related projects, collaborations, tools, practices, and discoveries in the thematic areas of interest in the MBDH region. The meeting is intended to build the community, share successes and opportunities, and to also provide interesting or emergent Big Data applications across the R+D space.
A detailed agenda can be found at http://midwestbigdatahub.org/2017-all-hands-meeting-agenda/.
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Join a Working Group
The success of the Midwest BD Hub will rely heavily on collaborations with partners in our region. Opportunities to participate include (but are not limited to):
· Partners to help educate and train the Big Data workforce in the region
· Participation on the steering committee
· Partners to help accelerate the ideation and development of Big Data solutions to specific regional and/or societal challenges
· Partners to provide tools and services to the BD Hub
· Partners to develop pilot programs for emerging Big Data technologies
We want to engage with partners from all sectors in the Midwest: industry, non-profits, academic, government agencies, public and private research centers and laboratories, to name a few. If you are interested in becoming a partner, email: Midwest BD Hub -- info@midwestbigdatahub.org.
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Subscribe to the MBDH Mailing List
Sign up to receive updates on upcoming events and news related to the Midwest Big Data Hub http://midwestbigdatahub.org/get-involved/mail-lists/
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Priority Areas and Thematic Communities
· Food-Energy-Water
· Agriculture
· Transportation
· Smart and Connected Communities
· Resilient Communities
· Business Analytics
· Network Sciences
· Healthcare and Biomedical Research: General
· Health: Neuroscience
· Materials Science and Informatics
· Manufacturing
More details at: http://research.unl.edu/internal-funding-opportunities/