Kraska, Binnig, And Collaborators Receive An NSF Big Data Spoke Grant For Data Sharing
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on Sept. 28, 2016
Less than a year after Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) began participation in the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub (BD Hub), Assistant Professor Tim Kraska (Principal Investigator) and Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) Carsten Binnig (Co-Principal Investigator) and colleagues at Drexel University and MIT have been awarded a Big Data Spoke award. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the BD Hub is an attempt to foster multisector collaborations across academia, industry, and government, bringing together a wide range of big data stakeholders to solve regional challenges. Big Data Spoke awards initiate research in specific areas identified, supported, and organized by the BD Hubs, working on challenges that require big data approaches.
In their proposal ("A Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing"), Tim and Carsten and their collaborators propose a new data sharing spoke that enables data providers to easily share data while enforcing constraints on the use of the data, with three goals:
- To create a licensing model for data that facilitates sharing data that is not necessarily open or free between different organizations,
- To develop a prototype data sharing platform, ShareDB, which enforces the terms and restrictions of the developed licenses, and
- To develop and integrate relevant metadata that will accompany the datasets shared under the different licenses, making them easily searchable and interpretable. This includes the creation of the North East Data Sharing Consortium, comprising many different stakeholders to make the licensing model widely accepted and usable in many application domains (e.g., health and finance).
The long-term goal of their project is to establish the ecosystem as the main data sharing platform for (but not limited to) the Northeast US, including a long-term effort to create a non-profit organization around the North East Data Sharing Consortium. It will bring together various data science domains and groups within Brown and Rhode Island and amplify the ongoing efforts of Brown's Data Science Initiative in creating a community around big data challenges and fostering productive collaborations.
For more information, please click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.