Dear Commons Community,

Malala Yousafzai, a 17-year-old schoolgirl and outspoken activist, from Pakistan, and the Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi, were announced as this year’s winners of the Noble Peace Prize. Ms. Yousafzai will share the $1.1 million award with Mr. Satyarthi, 60, a veteran, soft-spoken activist based in New Delhi who has rescued trafficked children from slavery. As reported in the New York Times:

“Announcing the prize in Oslo on Friday, the committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, said it was important for “a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism” — a resonant message in a week in which the Pakistani and Indian armies have exchanged shellfire across a disputed stretch of border, killing 20 villagers. But it was also a message that highlighted how far Ms. Yousafzai has come from her original incarnation as the schoolgirl who defied the Taliban and lived to tell the tale…

“I was totally surprised when I was told, ‘Congratulations, you have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and you are sharing it with a great person who is also working for children’s rights,’ ” Ms. Yousafzai said at a news conference…

“If with my humble efforts the voice of tens of millions of children in the world who are living in servitude is being heard, congratulations to all,” Mr. Satyarthi said in a television interview on Friday.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a major move to support research on the use of big data in medicine, the National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday awards totaling $32-million. More than two dozen institutions will use the funding to devise innovative ways of helping researchers handle huge sets of data seen as increasingly central to future medical discoveries. The grants are the first outlay in a project, announced last year and known as Big Data to Knowledge, that’s expected to involve more than $600-million in spending by 2020. Its goals include developing and distributing methods, software, and tools for sharing, analyzing, managing, and integrating data into medical research. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Examples of the medical challenges that the grant recipients hope to help solve include finding disease associations in the three billion base pairs in the human genome, or in the estimated 86 billion neurons in the human brain, NIH officials said.

“Data creation has become exponentially more rapid than anything we anticipated even a decade ago,” the NIH’s director, Francis S. Collins, said during a briefing on Thursday, “and the challenge is to try to be sure we’re not exceeding the ability of researchers to capitalize on the data.”

“We see more and more the NIH as a digital enterprise,” said Philip E. Bourne, who this year became the agency’s first permanent associate director for data science.

The awards announced on Thursday were divided by the NIH into four broad categories: Twelve centers that will focus on solving computing challenges, nine that will create indexing systems for large volumes of biomedical data, nine that will tackle training and career-development strategies, and another nine that will develop course materials related to big data, including open online formats.

The grant recipients are a mix of leading public and private research institutions. Those with multiple awards are the University of California at San Diego, with three grants, and Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the Oregon Health and Science University, Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California, with two apiece.”

Tony