Indian institutes tie up with German university for big data studies

Bio big data science. This is the field in which six Indian institutes—Indian Institutes of Technology at Madras, Guwahati and Kanpur, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Allahabad University—have had a tie up with Germany's Heidelberg University and the Indian government's department of biotechnology. They will be setting up 50 PhD research projects which will be supervised by both Indian and German guides.  

Big data is a field in which researchers extract and make sense of data from volumes that are massive and therefore difficult to classify into traditional sets. In the field of biology, big data gets even bigger. For instance, genomic sequences across and within populations, bio-chemical reactions, molecular chains etc comprise big data in life sciences. In fact, it is said that life sciences deal with bulkier big data than other systems. Applying big data analytics to these studies would therefore not only just make sense, but also throw up interesting information which would take traditional processes much longer to arrive at. 

In the first phase of the funding, both Heidelberg University and DBT will release three million euros each for the research. Michael J. Winckler, programme co-ordinator for Heidelberg University, said that they hoped to create new lasting research collaborations with Indian universities. He said that the topics under this programme were highly relevant for the development of biotechnology in both countries. 

Big data studies are already on in India. At IIT Madras, for instance, there is the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The premier institute also has the Initiative for Biological Systems Engineering. Karthik Raman of IIT Madras noted that the tie up would act as a catalyst in developing strong collaborations in the frontier area of biological data analysis. 

Big biological data is being handled under several projects in the country. The recently launched is the Genome India Project. The first part of this massive initiative of Whole Genome Sequencing started recently in the northeast. It aims at doing the WGS of 2,000 individuals from various ethnicities of the northeast region. Given that India is one among a handful of countries where the entire genome of one individual has been sequenced, a WGS of 2,000 is a huge task, and will certainly entail biological big data analysis.