NSF Awards $5M to Empower Researchers with New Data Analysis Tools

A team of Indiana University Bloomington computer scientists working to improve how researchers across the sciences empower big data to solve problems have been awarded $5 million by the National Science Foundation.

Led by IU Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Informatics Geoffrey Fox, the team will address one of the leading challenges in tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues in science: the ability to analyze and compute large amounts of data. Hampered by the ever-increasing volume, variety and velocity of data, scientists are expected to embrace a project that will design, develop and implement building blocks that enable a fundamental improvement in the ability to support data-intensive analysis on a wide range of cyberinfrastructure.

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Specifically, the five-year project will address major data challenges in seven research communities: biomolecular simulations, network and computational social science, epidemiology, computer vision, spatial geographical information systems, remote sensing for polar science, and pathology informatics.

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Called MIDAS — Middleware for Data-Intensive Analytics and Science — the new software will enable scalable applications with the abilities of high-performance computing systems and the rich functionality of open-source storage and large-scale processing clusters on community hardware like Apache Hadoop.

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