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National Data Platform Pilot: Services for Equitable Open Access to Data

The National Data Platform (NDP) bridges the data gaps for AI by offering an online data ecosystem of data services. NDP works with researchers, educators, and students to discover, access, and use AI-ready data, execute AI workflows, and deploy distributed AI services. The platform promotes collaboration, innovation, and equitable data use, enhancing existing research computing investments and facilitating scientific and AI advancements.

Being built with input from a diverse community, NDP enables researchers to seamlessly create and integrate data analysis and AI into their work, empowers educators to discover and create AI educational resources, and provides students with engaging data projects to learn AI skills. NDP democratizes open access to comprehensive datasets and advanced analytics tools, particularly benefiting underrepresented and underserved communities. It aims to overcome data fragmentation and the lack of unified platforms, which hinder AI innovation and contribute to inequalities. Through interconnected data services, standardized protocols, and robust governance, NDP is being built to streamline data access and analysis, empowering users to make informed decisions, drive innovation, and address societal challenges.

Project leads, key team members

Ilkay Altintas (Principal Investigator, UC San Diego), Melissa Floca (Co-Principal Investigator, UC San Diego), Amarnath Gupta (Co-Principal Investigator, UC San Diego), Charles Meertens (Co-Principal Investigator, University of Colorado, Boulder), Ivan Rodero (Co-Principal Investigator, University of Utah), Manish Parashar (University of Utah)

Advancing NAIRR Infrastructure

NDP provides a novel integrated open-access cyberinfrastructure built around composable systems and services to democratize the development of, access to, and use of data and AI in scalable scientific, educational, and use-inspired workflows.

Advancing AI research

NDP provides a catalog of open data from diverse providers and repositories that are ready for analysis using open cyberinfrastructure within AI workflows to learn/experiment with existing AI techniques and build novel AI techniques.

Innovative partnerships

NDP partners with a number of NAIRR resource providers to integrate the resources in AI workflows. In addition, we are building a translational approach to integrate AI workflows into the work of our stakeholders including government agencies, civil society and tribal organizations, academia, industry representatives, technology experts, data providers and users, and the general public.

Advancing domain science

NDP builds representative examples of important AI patterns that exist in science today, including working with large datasets, streaming data from facilities, and creating and using knowledge graphs. These patterns are implemented as production-quality specialized value-added services through our driving case studies in wildland fire, earthquake, and food security. They will be generalized for long-term replication and use by external communities to support high-impact science.

Broader Impacts

NDP is driven by the vision to contribute to the nation's data and AI research community and workforce through a commitment to building a broadly accessible data ecosystem that enables 1) diverse and equitably accessible data sources, 2) perspectives and experiences for diverse students and researchers, and 3) research practices and governance processes for equitably managing both the benefits and risks related to data-driven/enabled research that leverage AI. NDP will partner with the broad (and particularly, the traditionally underrepresented) community) to ensure their participation in needs assessments, co-design workshops, data challenges, and prototyping activities.

More information

Learn more about how the National Data Platform Pilot can meet your needs by contacting our team directly at ndp@sdsc.edu. Visit our website and log in to NDP with your institutional email at https://www.nationaldataplatform.org/