NSF BIGDATA PI meeting – domain-specific research directions and data sets

In March 2017, PIs and co-PIs funded through the NSF BIGDATA program were brought together along with selected industry and government invitees to discuss current research, identify current challenges, discuss promising future directions, foster new collaborations, and share accomplishments, at BDPI-2017. Given that two recent NITRD [2] and NSF [1] meeting reports contained a set of recommendations, grand challenges, and high impact priorities for Big Data, the organizers of this meeting shifted the focus of the breakout sessions to discuss problems and available data sets that exist in five application domains – policy, health, education, economy & finance, and environment & energy. These domains were selected based on a survey of the PIs/co-PIs and should not be interpreted as being more important than others. Slides that were presented by the different breakout group leaders are available at https://www.bi.vt.edu/nsf-big-data/. We hope this report will serve as a blueprint for promising big data research in five application domains.