West Hub Updates: NSF Meeting, Spokes Solicitation, Save the Dates

Greetings from the first joint National Science Foundation BIGDATA and Big Data Hubs & Spokes Principal Investigator Meeting!

We are excited to convene leaders from each of the hubs and spokes this week in Washington, D.C. to discuss our initial progress and upcoming opportunities to engage. Follow along on social media with #BDHubs as we live tweet from the program starting March 16! Some highlights from the meeting:

Our Spokes Projects are starting to host their first workshops and community events. Check out the guest blogpost from the Institute of Sytems Biology and Protein Data Bank about the Gene Variation 3D Workshop just posted, as well as the announcement for the WBDIH Workshop that will be part of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing’s inaugural Evidence-Based Policing Conference May 22-23, 2017.

At the poster session, spokes projects are crowdsourcing input from the meeting participants. Join the survey from the Reproducibility Spoke team to share your perspective, and stay tuned for our new mailing lists for Working Groups on Reproducibility, Metro Data Science, and more.

We have a new logo! View it on our new West Hub At-a-Glance summary / Save the Date card, and please send your suggestions for what communications materials and workspaces would be most useful to you as we evolve westbigdatahub.org.

Save the Date: Our 2nd annual All Hands Meeting with workshops focused on Big Data Policy, Western Water, and the National Data Science Challenge on Reducing Traffic Fatalities, will take place June 5-6 in Boulder, CO. Ideas for content/structure should be directed to info@westbigdatahub.org and you'll be hearing soon from our Program Committee!

The Spokes FY2018 Solicitation has just been released. Proposals are due September 2017, and NSF will mention more over the next two days. Stay tuned here (more info below) and on social media for updates!

We appreciate your help spreading the word to increase participation across each state (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming). To help us grow our community, please forward this note widely and tell your colleagues to join our mailing list!

On behalf of the WBDIH leadership team and our growing network of collaborators, thank you for your continued interest, support, and enthusiasm. Hope to see or hear from you soon!

Best,

Meredith
Meredith M. Lee, Ph.D. | Executive Director, West Big Data Innovation Hub | mmlee@berkeley.edu

The Big Data activities of a BD Spoke will be guided by the following broad themes:

Accelerating progress towards addressing societal grand challenges relevant to the regional and national priority areas defined by the BD Hubs (see our thematic and cross-cutting areas on our website and captured in our West Hub At-a-Glance summary);
Helping automate the Big Data lifecycle; and
Enabling access to and spurring the use of important and valuable available data assets, including international data sets where relevant.

NSF's overall Big Data R&D portfolio includes fundamental research, infrastructure development and provisioning, education and workforce development, and community engagement. Not all of these aspects of the overall portfolio are covered by this solicitation. In particular, this solicitation is not meant to fund proposals in which fundamental research is the primary activity.

NEW FOR THIS SOLICITATION: There are two proposal categories covered by this solicitation: SMALL and MEDIUM BD Spokes.

As was the case for the first BD Spoke solicitation, NSF notes that all proposals submitted in response to this solicitation must include a Letter of Collaboration from a regional BD Hub.

We look forward to assisting Big Data Spoke proposal development by helping coordinate our region's response and by identifying potential partnerships to strengthen our region's proposals. Stay tuned for more details leading up to the Sept. 18, 2017 deadline, and please feel free to contact us at info@westbigdatahub.org.