Discovery Frontiers Call for Proposals:
Exploring Big Data

Description

Discovery Frontiers grants support a limited number of large international activities, opportunities or projects that are of high priority in the context of advanced research in Canada. These will be led by world-class Canadian researchers and will comprise teams that will generate substantial impact, for the benefit of Canada.

This initiative will bring together groups of researchers in new ways to address a major research challenge. The groups will incorporate new and emerging ideas and will combine their complementary expertise to conduct transformative, paradigm-changing research.

In 2013, there are two calls for proposals in partnership with Canadian and international research funding organizations. The calls are focused on the development of tools and techniques to better understand big data generated by a wide range of disciplines.

Advancing Big Data Science in Genomics Research

Massive amounts of data are being generated by genomics research across all life science sectors. The lack of efficient tools and methodologies available to effectively mine, rapidly access and efficiently analyze vast quantities of genomic information and integrate it with other data sets is a major challenge for the research community. 

To address this global research challenge, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Genome Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) will partner on this call for proposals, which will focus on advancing big data science in genomics research. The aim of this initiative is to support the development of tools and methodologies to integrate currently available complex data sets in the fields of ‘omics sciences with each other, as well as phenotypic data and data from other related fields of biological sciences.

This call for proposals will be administered by NSERC. For more details and instructions on how to apply, please go to: Discovery Frontiers Call for Proposals: Advancing Big Data Science in Genomics Research.

Digging into Data

The Digging into Data Challenge competition is sponsored by 10 leading funders from four countries (Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States):

• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in collaboration with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI);
• The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research—Humanities, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences (NWO) in collaboration with The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC)
• The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC);
• The UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC);
• The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc);
• The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS);
• The US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); and
• The US National Science Foundation (NSF).

The goal of the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials available for research in the humanities and the social sciences—ranging from digitized books, newspapers and music to information generated by Internet-based activities, mobile communications, administrative data from public agencies and customer databases from private sector organizations—what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.

The Digging into Data Challenge is administered by the US National Endowment for the Humanities. For more details and instructions on how to apply, please go to the  Digging Into Data Challenge Website.