The COVID Information Commons (CIC) is an open website to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across various COVID research efforts initiated by the Big Data Hubs. The initial focus of the CIC website is on NSF-funded COVID Rapid Response Research (RAPID) projects. The CIC serves as a resource for researchers, students and decision-makers from academia, government, not-for-profits and industry to identify collaboration opportunities, to leverage each other's research findings, and to accelerate the most promising research to mitigate the broad societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government (PEPI-G) supports faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (rising juniors and seniors as of 2020) from the 16 states that comprise the South Big Data Regional Innovation Hub (South BD Hub).

Just how Big is Big Data? It’s difficult to wrap our heads around it. We now carry in our pockets computers (a.k.a. smartphones) that have 1 million times more memory than NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer, which was used to land the first human beings on the moon. The world’s most powerful supercomputer is the Summit housed at the Oakridge National Laboratory. It can perform 200 quadrillion (1 x 1015) calculations per second.

COVID-19 continues to spread across the country and around the world. The current strategy for managing the spread of COVID-19 is social distancing, and a new white paper from Georgia Tech applies the use of an interactive Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to conceptualize the impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19.

The NSF Spoke Project ‘Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge’ 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.

PEPI-G supports data faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students from across the country in working on high level problems for the federal government. Our 2020 program partner is the Department of Homeland Security – Advanced Research Projects Agency (DHS-ARPA).

Two fellows were selected for the 2019 cycle of the PEPI-G Program. The Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government (PEPI-G) supports faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (rising juniors and seniors as of 2019) from the 16 states that comprise the South Hub.

As part of the DataUp program, University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras (UPRRP) held 35 learners on August 18. Learners gained valuable skills beneficial to the development of their current and future research while UPRRP witnessed the institutional interest regarding data science and genomics.

On September 28 – 29, the DataUp program hosted a 2-day workshop at Texas A&M University – Kingsville, a historically Hispanic serving institution in Southern Texas. No matter the level of coding expertise, each learner noted how the workshop and the utilization of JupyterHub will benefit their future research and project opportunities.

As part of the DataUp program,Johnson C. Smith University held a workshop on Oct 18-19, 2018 to introduce shell, git, R, Matlab and the JupyterHub. The learners from both the humanities and natural sciences began to think about how an interactive notebook could benefit their disciplines and create collaborative projects on their campus.