Rensselaer computer scientist Francine Berman to
lead U.S. engagement
Data sharing across media and national |
The National Science Foundation today awarded a $2.5-million
grant to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to enable its
participation in a new international organization that will
accelerate research data sharing among scientists around the
globe.
The grant will be used to develop a Research Data Alliance
(RDA) that will allow researchers the world over to
collaboratively use scientific data to speed up innovation.
To date, more than 120 U.S. and international participants
are helping conceptualize the organization and populate its
first efforts. Along with scientific and data leaders from the
United States, members from Australia and the European Union
are part of the new alliance’s organizational steering
committee. U.S. participation will be led by Rensselaer
Computer Science Professor Francine Berman.
“The Research Data Alliance addresses a world-wide need for
efforts that accelerate data-driven innovation,” Berman said.
“The National Science Foundation, with U.S. and international
partners, is expanding the global conversation on data-driven
research. Community development of the RDA will contribute to
the global infrastructure needed for new discovery and
insights.”
The international launch and first plenary of the RDA will
be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in March of 2013.
As an example of gains that can be expected from the RDA,
Berman explained that researchers sharing open-access data sets
about a particular disease would increase the pool of
information, and therefore, the potential for insights that can
only be gained at large scale.
She added that the coordination of economic data sets,
geographic data sets and census data to create urban data sets
can be used to make strategic predictions about programs and
initiatives that can improve the quality of life in cities.
“All of us use digital information every day to augment our
lives in innovative ways,” Berman said. “The goal of the
Research Data Alliance is to help researchers work with a world
of useful digital information more innovatively and at
scale.”
“RDA today is a timely, ambitious and practical advance in
data sharing that is key to scientific collaboration, enabling
discoveries to address needs of our global society,” said
Robert Chadduck, NSF program director for data and
cyberinfrastructure, which funded the grant. “We are proud to
join our global colleagues in supporting this initiative.”
Leading up to RDA’s March launch meeting in Sweden,
collaboration is already underway in a number of areas, with
new RDA members developing charters for working groups. Berman
and her collaborators expect the RDA to facilitate
outcome-oriented efforts in a variety of areas, including the
development and adoption of data cyberinfrastructure, the
harmonization of standards, and the development and adoption of
data-sharing policy and practice, as well as other efforts. The
goal is to make data obtained from scientific research easier
to access, combine, use and re-use for discovery.
Although the RDA has broad scope, it is being loosely
modeled on a number of successful community organizations,
including the Internet Engineering Task Force, which focuses on
Internet standards, and the Message Passing Interface Forum,
which focused on communication protocols for parallel
computers.
“At some point, individual efforts achieve a ‘tipping
point,’ where community coordination is needed to accelerate
progress,” Berman said. “With increasing global recognition of
the potential of ‘Big Data’ to drive new insights, the data
community is coming together to facilitate efforts that require
community-wide coordination to achieve impact.”
Berman is an
international leader in data cyberinfrastructure. Prior to
joining Rensselaer in 2009, she served as director of the San
Diego Supercomputer Center for nine years. She joined
Rensselaer as vice president for research and recently stepped
down to serve as the Chair of Research Data Alliance/U.S.
“This is a tremendously exciting time for the data community
and the world that benefits from ubiquitous information
everywhere,” Berman said. “I am delighted to be contributing at
a global level, and to help develop an organization that has
tremendous potential for positive impact.”
Media Contacts
Lisa-Joy Zgorski, NSF (703) 292-8311 lisajoy@nsf.gov
Mark Marchand, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (518) 276-6098
marchm3@rpi.edu
Program Contacts
Bob Chadduck, NSF (703) 292-2247 rchadduc@nsf.gov
Related Websites
Research Data Alliance Website: http://www.rd-alliance.org
Francine Berman’s biographical information: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~bermaf
