Call for Proposals SDSC

Call for Data Science Proposals

The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) offers project grants for interdisciplinary research teams. The project grants run for up to two years and range from 300’000 to 600’000 Swiss Francs. Eligible institutions of the ETH Domain can submit 5-page pre-proposals by April 14, 2017. Funded projects are expected to start next Fall.

An introduction to the call, detailed submission guidelines and selection criteria are described in the official call for SDSC proposals.

The motivations of this first call for SDSC Data Science Projects are threefold:

  1. Foster and accelerate the adoption of data science across the ETH Domain: The SDSC is expected to facilitate a strong synergy between data providers, data and computer scientists, and subject-matter experts, fostering scientific breakthroughs with significant societal impact. Projects showing an interdisciplinary character by linking research groups from traditionally separated disciplines are encouraged.
  2. Explore the use of or expand on the SDSC hosted platform and services for ETH Domain scientists: The SDSC is developing a highly scalable open software platform offering a one-stop-shop for hosting, exploring and analyzing curated, calibrated and optionally anonymized data at scale, at-rest or in-motion. Projects must explicitly describe how they intend to leverage the SDSC platform, or expand its tools and services.
  3. Promote Open (Data) Science: The SDSC platform also offers user-friendly tooling and services to help with the adoption of Open Science, fostering collaboration, research productivity and excellence. Projects are expected to follow guidelines and best practices to enable reusability and reproducibility of research.

An SDSC Data Science Project is proposed and led by one main applicant from an ETH Domain institution. The Management Office of the SDSC will assist in the administration and coordination of the project and will ensure accountability of the project according to the directives defined.

The center will cover the operational expenses of the successful projects, including provisioning of compute and storage resources, and cost recovery of the center’s R&D embedded staff, who can be temporarily located in any of the ETH Domain institutions, as well as cost recovery for R&D staff specialized in the research field of the proposal, who would be employed by the grantees’ institutions for the specific project, if properly justified.