Putting the Power of Data to Work for America | The White House

"If you look across all organizations out there, which one has made the biggest change in being data driven? My answer is the U.S. Government. As a data scientist, one thing I can guarantee is that this is the most data-driven President we’ve ever had. Need proof? This is the President that established Data.gov -- a one stop shop for the data that is produced by the government. And that list of data sets is growing thanks to the President’s Executive Action that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This Administration also created the first set of dashboards at the Federal level to monitor over $70 billion in IT investments. On top of that the President announced in the State of the Union his ambitious plan to bring together big data, data science, and medicine to make precision medicine a reality. For me, data is deeply personal. When I was a first year graduate student at the University of Maryland, I was interested in studying weather patterns ... We have an incredible opportunity to unleash the power of data to create better government, build better services for our citizens, and unlock new economic innovations. Take for example some of the incredible work that the VA is doing in using data to provide better services. Or the potential when we bring NOAA data together with Census data to better understand flood plain impact as populations move. Central to Precision Medicine is data. This promising initiative will leverage advances in genomics, emerging methods for managing and analyzing large data sets while protecting privacy, and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries and save lives ..."