Melissa Healy from the Los Angeles Times reported the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $32 million in grants to make extensive biomedical data sets available to researchers across the globe.
Of the 12 “centers of excellence”, Stanford University's Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) will attempt to provide a large digital archive of infectious disease data that will give researchers the ability to compare studies and identify patterns in their findings.
NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins expects to invest $656 million to the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative over the next seven years. “The potential of these data, when used effectively, is quite astounding," Collins said. As the BD2K initiative develops tools to allow the widespread circulation and study of big data, "the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts”.