Last week I attended the annual EarthCube All Hands Meeting (ECAHM) in Alexandria, Washington. Since it’s been a while since I last wrote my last post, I think it would be interesting to share my notes and highlights here for anyone who missed the event.
ECAHM meetings are usually very enriching experiences, as they bring together a variety of researchers from different fields related to geosciences, ranging from computer scientists to volcanologists or marine biologists. The purpose of the meeting is to gather the community together and hear everyone report back from their EarthCube NSF funded projects, which are targeted towards improving cyber-infrastructure in the geosciences. As a computer scientist, I think this is a great meeting to attend for two main reasons: first, you always learn something new, even if it’s not in your domain. Second, people are extremely grateful to your contributions, as you are helping them become more effective when doing their science.
So, what was I doing at ECAHM 2018?
I attended the meeting to present our latest progress in OntoSoft, a distributed software metadata registry we created at ISI to facilitate scientists describe their software. You can see the poster abstract online (and soon the poster itself). I also participated on a “speed-dating session”, where I got to discuss for half an hour how to describe software with a domain scientist; and I substituted Yolanda Gil in a panel for external partnership opportunities, where I presented the Open Knowledge Network initiative. This effort, led by NITRD, is a great opportunity of creating a shared open knowledge graph that would be used for both research and industry to refine and curate its contents. The idea is that this knowledge graph becomes part of the US infrastructure the same way supercomputers currently are, so anyone could benefit from it and also contribute to it. It looks like the NSF is keen to pursue this objective too.
Two colleagues of mine also presented other initiatives I am involved in. Deborah Khider showcased our efforts towards structuring metadata and creating standards in the paleoclimate sciences, together with a set of tools that a team of paleo-climate scientists have developed to work with that structured data. She also managed to mix Star Wars and Star Trek themes in her poster and presentation, which was well received by the attendants (I think everyone stopped at her poster)
Jo Martin presented the IS-GEO research collaboration network, where we are bringing in experts from geosciences and intelligent systems to foster new collaborations. We hold a monthly meeting where we have every time a different researcher talking about their latest work! Check it out here: https://is-geo.org/resources/research-presentations/
About the keynotes:
As expected, keynotes at ECAHM are nothing like venues such as AAAI or IUI. The first speaker was Dean Pesnell (NASA) and he presented the research carried out by his team on studying the sun and sun spots. Why is this related to geosciences? Because the sun could be considered “our ground truth for the universe”, and anything related to its activity has many implications in any of the fields of geosciences. Their main problem is how to analyze the amount of data that they have. Each of their datasets may contain several hundred million images, so proper metadata is crucial (you don’t want to find out you have downloaded 300 million images for nothing). Dean showed some impressive videos of their observations of the sun, as well as their pipelines to handle “very big data” analyses.
The second speaker was Sarah Stamps, and she talked about continental rift and the Tanzania Volcano observatory. Apparently, geologists are one of the few people in the word who would run towards an erupting volcano, instead of away from it. Sarah described the EARS system (East African Rift System) they are setting up, and how they teamed up with CHORDS to enable real time analysis of the observations they measure on the field. Thanks to her work, they are developing an early warning system for hazard detection! Sarah was departing soon to set a few more observing stations in the field, so best of luck!!
The third speaker was Caroline S. Wagner, who gave some metrics on the social side of interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines. Science has become increasingly collaborative and team based, and the number of international collaborations have doubled in the past years. The number of countries producing 95% of research has gone from 7 to 15, which indicates we are moving in the right direction. However, more than 50% of the articles are currently never cited. A few takeaways from this talk are: 1) International collaborations start face to face, so go to different events and meet new people; 2) Diverse teams usually take longer to be productive, as people don’t usually speak the same language. Be patient!!; 3) Work towards a solution, not towards interdisciplinar teams. Interdisciplinarity should be the means to an end, not the end itself.
Other highlights
Below are some additional highlights I found interesting for the EarthCube community.
- Eva Zanzerika reported on the NSF 10 Big Ideas, which nicely summarize the interests of the agency in terms of funding in the next years. The report has been out since more than 1 year ago, but it’s never too late to catch up!
- Doug Fils presented their plan for turning P418 turning into something bigger. In case you don’t know, P418 currently tracks the metadata of datasets exposed as schema.org and aggregates it in a search engine (a search engine for scientific data). Future plans are to ingest other types of resources and make the code base stable.
- Interesting working lunch idea: A napkin drawing exercise. Do you know how to present your idea with a simple sketch?
- Simon Goring (and Scott Peckham): How do we measure success on a huge program such as Earthcube?
- PANGEO: Big data in the geosciences (but without reinventing the wheel!)
- ASSET: Or how to incorporate existing tools into your workflows by drawing sketches! Workflows are important! Two different studies may obtain results even if the original data is the same:
- I got an award for community service 🙂 :
Linking Research 