Todd Park, the newly-appointed U.S. Chief Technology Officer for the White House, will attempt to address questions about Big Data in 140 characters or less during a live Twitter chat scheduled today at 2. p.m ET.

The 30-minute Twitter chat is expected to give Park an opportunity to highlight the White House’s new Big Data Research and Development Initiative, and more specifically, efforts supporting the use of big data in the health sector.

Questions can be posed now and during the event using the hashtag #AskToddCTO and readers can follow the chat via @todd_park.

The question and answer session is part of a broader international effort, called Big Data Week, organized by DataSift, a company specializing in a social data platform. The effort is intended to bring together a mixture of communities including data scientists, data visualizers, data technologists and CIOs to better understand the technology challenges and commercial opportunities for Big Data.

The Big Data Week effort involves more than 50 events on three continents, according to organizers. The full list of events can be found at http://www.bigdataweek.com .