Big news about big data

A White House webinar scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday is shaping up to be the biggest news for big data watchers in months.

Either before or during the webinar White House officials plan to announce a $200 million cross-agency investment in big data research, according to an article by New York Times reporter Steve Lohr, who will be moderating a panel discussion during the event.

"Administration officials compare the initiative to past government research support for high-speed networking and supercomputing centers, which have had an impact in areas like climate science and Web browsing software," Lohr reported.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health will announce a research initiative "seeking new techniques and technologies for data management, data analysis and machine learning, which is a branch of artificial intelligence," according to the Times story.

Other agencies set to announce big data initiatives include the U.S. Geological Survey, the Defense Department, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Energy Department, the Times reported.

NIH also will announce during the webinar that it is making the human genome project a publicly available data set on Amazon's EC2 computing cloud, according to a blog post from Amazon.

You can tune into the webinar here at 2 p.m.