Please see below for updates and opportunities – from on-demand video content and community spotlights to recaps from our activities and our open search for the next West Hub Executive Director! New to the West Hub? Browse our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, a 'living document' that outlines our vision, mission, strategic goals, and more.
In addition to the announcements and activities below, we welcome new connections. If you are interested in having your data science project, program, resource, or opportunity featured in a future West Hub newsletter, please email us at info@westbigdatahub.org or connect on social media. Community Spotlight: Building Tribal Capacity with Water Research Read more here about the West Hub’s participation in a recent New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NM WRRI) workshop to raise awareness of the water crises affecting tribes and nations within and bordering New Mexico. The goal was to bring together community partnerships, build trust, and foster future collaborations, emphasizing the importance of tribal perspectives, in water disparities and management. This piece was written by West Hub intern, Alice Lei, participating in the Research Experience for High School Students (REHS) program at SDSC, and includes input from PI Christine Kirkpatrick at UC San Diego as former PI Mike Norman steps down from the SDSC Director position effective July 2021. WiDS Datathon 2021 Health Data Excellence in Research Award
With 17 original research papers, 8 countries represented, and dozens of mentors, the results are in from the 2021 Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon Excellence in Research Award, hosted by the West Hub and WiDS Datathon Committee in collaboration with the national network of Big Data Hubs. Read the details in the August 2021 announcement, and learn more from deeper interviews with participants. Surveys show that 32% of Excellence in Research Award participants identify as beginners in data science, 42% had not participated previously in any machine learning or predictive analytics competitions, 73% datathon participants said they gained new skills in data science, and 58% said it increased their confidence. Congratulations to all who joined the WiDS Datathon 2021 since the January 2021 launch, and stay tuned for announcements about WiDS Datathon 2022! Celebrating 20 years: Project Jupyter and #OpenScience Reflections Over the years, the West Hub has featured open access Jupyter Notebooks and interactive computing resources for many activities, projects, and initiatives – including our Water Data Challenges, collaborations with the U.S. Department of Transportation, WiDS, and the National Workshop on Data Science Education. UC Berkeley Computing, Data Science, and Society spoke with Professor Fernando Pérez about the growth of Project Jupyter, the importance of open science, and more. Read the interview Q&A and explore the story behind one of 10 computer codes that transformed science. RRoCCET21 Content Online In mid-August, the West Hub co-hosted RRoCCET21, a virtual conference for researchers interested in exploring the benefits and opportunities unlocked by migrating research to the public cloud. The event presented the cloud as an accessible platform for research computing, with attendees joining demos and tutorials, Q&A sessions, and presentations of successful case studies that utilize cloud computing and other emerging technologies. More than 120 participants attended this inaugural RRoCCET conference. Speakers represented the major cloud providers as well as Washington State University, UC San Diego, MIT, Clemson University, Columbia, University of Washington, Caltech, and the University of Maryland. Their topics covered neuroscience, wildfire modeling, public transit, genome analysis, mental health support, and more. View the library of recorded talks here. The event was organized by CloudBank, an NSF-funded cloud access initiative.
Last Call for Proposals: Opportunity to form Data Communities Ithaka S+R has partnered with the Data Curation Network and opened a call for participation for researchers seeking to improve data sharing via the fully NSF-funded workshop, “Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science” to better understand the needs and practices of data communities. The workshop will bring together representatives from established networks of researchers who engage in organized, voluntary data sharing, or individuals who would like to create such a network. Participants will receive one-on-one access to an information professional with specialized expertise to help participants identify individualized solutions to their data sharing challenges, and funding to attend a two-day incubation workshop at the University of Michigan in the spring of 2022. Apply by September 1, 2021.
Reminder: Sept. 3 Deadline for Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government
The Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government (PEPI-G) supports data faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students from across the country in working on high level problems for the federal government. The 2022 partner, the Department of Homeland Security, is seeking applicants in cybersecurity areas including general cybersecurity, cyber threat detection, cyber security analytics, next generation cybersecurity, and cybersecurity artificial intelligence / machine learning. Fellowships will span 4-12 months, beginning in early 2022. Apply now, and stay tuned for more announcements about workshop and pilot research opportunities.
Data Sharing and Cyberinfrastructure Working Group
The Data Sharing and Cyberinfrastructure Working Group is a collaboration across all four of the Big Data Innovation Hubs. Each month, the working group brings together data scientists and cyberinfrastructure professionals to learn about topics of common interest. Learn more about the upcoming September and October meetings online and view past meeting notes here.
Gateways 2021 Call for Community Participation Gateways 2021 is planned as an opportunity to influence the vision and mission of the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI), the gateways community, and the Gateways Conference series. It will offer diverse options for sharing work and networking in the community. The format includes tutorial sessions, panels, presentations in the form of lightning talks, and working sessions. Submission of abstracts related to science gateways, which are end-to-end solutions with easy-to-use interfaces enabling the application of complex research infrastructures such as computing and data infrastructures, instruments, and other domain-specific resources to support research and education are due September 22, 2021, in advance of the October 19-21, 2021 opportunity.
COVID Info Commons: Research Lightning Talks, Q&A Sept. 22
The next COVID Info Commons (CIC) webinar Sept. 22 includes Janet Iwasa (University of Utah): Building a visual consensus model of the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle.If you are interested in presenting NSF or NIH funded COVID research at a future CIC webinar, please email info@covidinfocommons.net.
Biodiversity Digitization September 22-23, 2021
Join the U.S. National Museum of Natural History – Smithsonian, Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) for two full days highlighting successes with biodiversity data digitization and mobilization. Find more details and register online.
2022 Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Applications Open
Are you passionate about scientific software and interested in contributing powerful ideas, tools and methodologies to benefit the broader community of scientific software developers and users? Consider applying for the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship, which will welcome its fifth recipient class in early 2022. At least three Fellows are selected annually based on a process that includes the proposal of a funded activity promoting better scientific software. Each Fellow is awarded up to $25,000 to carry out their work – often taking the form of a workshop, tutorial, or other engaging content, with emphasis on sustainable long-term community impact. The fellowships are jointly sponsored by DOE and NSF, with an application deadline of September 30, 2021. Driving Road Safety Forward: Video Data Privacy Task, featured in benchmarking initiative, now open
Building upon the National Transportation Data Challenge hosted by the network of Big Data Innovation Hubs, this collaboration with the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration and Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims to advance the state-of-the-art in video de-identification, encouraging participants from all sectors to develop and demonstrate techniques with the provided data. Successful methods balancing driver privacy with fidelity of relevant information have the potential to not only broaden researcher access to existing data, but also inform the trajectory of transportation safety research, policy, and education initiatives. In addition to being hosted on the West Hub's submittable platform, the Task is featured in the 2021 MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation benchmarking initiative, which generates dozens of research papers each year. Register now to access data from the GitHub repository and receive announcements about Jupyter Notebook tutorials, team formation, and seed funding opportunities. If you are interested in having your data science project, program, resource, or opportunity featured in a future West Hub newsletter, please email us at info@westbigdatahub.org.
Job Opportunity
Executive Director, West Big Data Innovation Hub
The Executive Director of the West Big Data Innovation Hub (West Hub) provides senior management and leadership of a multi-institution and multidisciplinary research effort. UC Berkeley serves as the home for the West Hub, one of a network of four regional efforts seeded by the National Science Foundation. Along with partner institutions, the University of Washington eScience Institute and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley serves as the central organizational point for the West Hub, which brings together academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations from across a 13 state region. We encourage all to learn more about this opportunity as well as additional openings at data.berkeley.edu/about/job-opportunities.
