Faculty Research and Development | South Big Data Innovation Hub

FACULTY, RESEARCH, & DEVELOPMENT OVERVIEW

The South Hub has a strong focus on impact for faculty and on the advancement of research and development across the region. The South Hub provides direct support to large and small-scale applied projects, academia-industry collaborations, and seed grant proposals.

IMPACT

$7+ Million in faculty lead projects
$135,000+ in early career faculty fellowships for travel and salary support to engage with industry partners
Over $ 100,000 in faculty training in data science for faculty at primarily teaching institutions, minority-led or -serving institutions, community colleges, and four-year liberal arts colleges

VIEW MORE ABOUT OUR WORK WITH FACULTY, RESEARCH, & DEVELOPMENT

SMART-DART: Health, Climate, and Social Equity Cohort

The South Big Data Hub will join CODATA-RDA, Microsoft, and AIM-AHEAD Southeast Hub at Morehouse School of Medicine to host a 10-week Health, Climate, and Social Equity Researcher Data Science Training Program through a mix of virtual and in-person instruction.

Reducing Uncertainty in Risk Projections for Statewide Hospital Capacity in COVID-19

This project was an awardee of the 2020 South Big Data Hub SEEDS Program - Southern Engagement and Enrichment in Data Science. It is one of three awards funded in the Seed Grant's small-range category of <$10,000. The PIs seek to study homeless data for the State of Delaware and model demand for beds in the statewide hospital capacity in response to COVID-19 data from Delaware.

The Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Program

The Harnessing the Data Revolution Input Coordination Activity is an All Hubs/NSF activity geared to surface and gather insights, recommendations, and ideas from the community. The recommendations were used by the HDR Steering Committee in a face-to-face meeting to organize and discuss needs for a national HDR network. This initiative is a national effort led by the South Big Data Hub, but supported by the Northeast, West, and Midwest Big Data Hubs.

Data and Cyberinfrastructure Working Group

The Data Sharing and Cyberinfrastructure Working Group is actively working in close collaboration with the South, Midwest, West, and Northeast Big Data Hubs, including representatives from the NDS, XSEDE, DataNet Federation, and iRODS Consortium to map resources, identify new collaborations, and facilitate data sharing across partners.

Large Scale Medical Informatics for Patient Care Coordination and Engagement

This project brings together six universities to design and construct a patient-focused and personalized health system that addresses the fractured nature of healthcare information and the lack of engagement of individuals in their own healthcare. As its first pilot, the researchers will focus on African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

Smart Grids Big Data

This project aims to increase our understanding of the merged data collected from physical systems in order to better understand how energy flows through grids, how to prevent emergencies such as blackouts and brownouts, and how to improve asset management and increase energy efficiency.

Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge

This project brings together scientists from a dozen institutions in academia, government, and industry to translate big data into meaningful knowledge that supports research and education in environmental sustainability. The project will focus on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the world’s largest database of biological species, and other biodiversity data sources. This project has repurposed VERA to model the effect of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19, including the SIR model of epidemiology. VERA enables a user to build conceptual models and agent-based simulations, and conduct "what if" virtual experiments. We believe that this interactivity should be a significant boon for learning and education.

PyData Carolinas offers tools and tips for bioinformatics research

PyData Carolinas 2016 brought together hundreds of professionals, researchers and students interested in data analysis to discuss how best to apply Python tools to meet challenges in data management, processing, analytics and visualization. Among the attendees was Clarence White, one of two students from North Carolina A & T who was sponsored by the South Big Data Hub to attend. The Hub was also a silver sponsor of PyData Carolinas. Read to learn more about the conference form a participant's point of view.

iCompBio REU and Workshop Provides Training to Students and Faculty

In the week of July 29-Aug 2, 2019, more than 50 faculty and students from more 21 institutions participated in two R bootcamps at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC). The iCompBio REU is supported by NSF Award 1852042, REU Site: ICompBio – Engaging Undergraduates in Interdisciplinary Computing for Biological Research. The first bootcamp on data wrangling using R was taught by Hong Qin, a computational biologist at UTC. Materials for this R Data Wrangling bootcamp is available at a public GitHub repository https://tinyurl.com/UTC-R-camps2019. The second bootcamp, Electronic Health Records, was taught by Elvena Fong and Zhuqi Miao from the Center for Health Systems Innovation at the Oklahoma State University.

PEPI Builds Bridges Between Industry and Researchers

The South Big Data Hub’s Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry (PEPI) pairs early-career faculty and researchers throughout the South with Industry Partners and support their travel to make collaboration possible.