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Midwest Big Data Hackathon, University of Iowa

Written by Sophie Bui

October 8–9, 2016
Iowa City, Iowa

The Midwest Big Data Hackathon is a 2-day, non-stop hackathon with 150 participants, and it will be held at University of Iowa—in the heart of downtown Iowa City, USA. The event is open to all university students that have a passion for creating things with technology!

Students will form teams to work on their project (or ‘hack’) up to 4 members. Projects are open format, which means that you can hack on web, mobile, desktop, or hardware applications. Company mentors will be available throughout the event for questions to make sure beginners and experts alike will have the help they need to successfully develop their project. All teams will demo their hacks at the end of the event and winners will be chosen by company mentors.

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NSF awards connect Midwest Big Data Hub and scientists to solve regional challenges

Written by Sophie Bui

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $10 million in “Big Data Spokes” awards to initiate research in specific areas identified, supported, and organized by the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). $2.4 million in Big Data Spoke, Early­ Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) and planning awards will connect the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH) and midwestern data scientists, to support digital agriculture; community-driven and sustainable neuroscience data infrastructure; improved sensor technologies; citizen scientists and real-time air quality monitoring; and new data-to-decision systems in hazards management by partnering data scientists with emergency personnel.

Read More

news, Spokes

Data Quality in a Big Data Era

Written by Sophie Bui

September 28-29, 2016
Cyberinfrastructure Building, Wrubel Lobby, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

What is data quality and what does it mean in the age of big data? Throughout the history of modern scholarship, the exchange of scholarly data was undertaken through personal interactions among scholars or through highly curated data archives, such as ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research). In both cases, implicit or explicit provenance mechanisms gave a relatively high degree of insurance of the quality of the data. However, the ubiquity of the web and mobile digital culture has produced disruptive new forms of data such as those based on citizen science, social network transactions, or massively deployed automatic sensors. Integrity and trustworthiness of these data are uncertain due to issues such as sampling characteristics, expertise of the data producers, or quality of the instruments. As these data are shared, fused, homogenized, and mixed, we need to ask ourselves what we know about the data and what we can trust. Failure to answer these questions endangers the integrity of the science produced from these data.

For more information, go to http://d2i.indiana.edu/mbdh.

Registration

There is no cost to attend but space is limited to 50 attendees. Registration will be available from August 5, 2016 until September 19, 2016. Early career scientists and researchers will be selected to predominantly fill available seats.

Travel Support

Travel support—automobile and lodging—for non-IU participants who are working in industry, government, or non-profit sectors is available. Qualified individuals are expected to present their work in a poster session Sept. 28, 2016 to showcase the breadth of developments occurring in Big Data. To be considered, please register by September 9, 2016 and apply for travel support. Application details are available at http://d2i.indiana.edu/mbdh/#scholarships.

Questions about the data quality workshop should be sent to Jill Minor, jsminor@indiana.edu.

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Food and Data Workshop: Interoperability through the Food Pipeline

Written by Sophie Bui

September 12-13, 2016
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The increasing ability to capture data at the level of individual agricultural fields, individual culinary recipes, and individual food waste digesters is allowing analytics-based optimization within the distinct industries responsible for producing, transporting, trading, storing, processing, packaging, wholesaling, retailing, consuming, and disposing of food. Yet addressing the pressing national/global challenges in food security due to climate change, as well as public health challenges such as obesity and malnutrition, requires optimization across the food pipeline. The Food and Data Workshop: Interoperability through the Food Pipeline, September 12-13 in the CSL Auditorium (B02), is concerned with understanding the relationship between data and food writ large, with a particular focus on questions of interoperable data ontologies, privacy, and analytic insights.

For more information and to register go to https://publish.illinois.edu/food-and-data-workshop/.

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Midwest Workshop on Neuroscience Big Data

Written by Sophie Bui

September 20-21, 2016
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Students, trainees, fellows, junior investigators, and outside researchers in Midwest academic institutions and industry partners are invited to attend and actively participate in the Midwest Workshop on Neuroscience Big Data. Expected workshop outcomes include (1) building an active Midwest Neuroscience Network Community, (2) open-sharing of data-intense challenges, datasets, research projects, expertise, software, services, protocols, resources, learning modules, and (3) productive discussions of joint (multi-institutional) grants, training opportunities, publications, research projects. The workshop success will be measured by assessing the community involvement (early registration, active workshop participation, post-workshop activities and interactions), website analytics (geographic locations of income traffic, counts, frequencies, and intensity of web-site utilization, and evidence of collaborations on development of software tools, services, learning materials, end-to-end pipeline workflows.

Registration is free, but space is limited. Sixty scholarships are being offered to students, post doctoral scholars and early career investigators in form of travel and lodging support to attend the workshop.

events, news, workshop

Missouri S&T Research and Technology Development Conference

Written by Sophie Bui

September 12-13, 2016
Havener Center
Rolla, Missouri

Midwest Big Data Hub is hosting an Early Career lightning talk session on the topic of data in a research project setting at the Missouri S&T Research and Technology Development Conference. Travel reimbursement for presenters is available for up to $250/presenter. Pre-tenured faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates are encouraged to give a quick 5-minute presentation on any data issue of relevance to a research project in which you participated. Eight to ten lightning talks will be scheduled. Apply today!

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Symposium on Frontiers in Big Data

Written by Sophie Bui

Friday, September 23, 2016 and Saturday, September 24, 2016
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

You are cordially invited to attend the Grainger Foundation-sponsored “Symposium on Frontiers in Big Data” on September 23-24 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. It is a great opportunity to:

  • ◦ Listen to invited talks, interview dialogs, panels, and debates regarding new challenges of Big Data;
  • ◦ Explore Big Data Frontiers in Bioinformatics, Agriculture, Systems, Optimization, and Machine Learning, with nationally renowned speakers, including:
    • • Michael Franklin (University of Chicago),
    • • Al Hero (University of Michigan),
    • • Michael Jordan (University of California, Berkeley),
    • • James Krogmeier (Purdue University),
    • • George Lan (Georgia Institute of Technology),
    • • Mihai Pop (University of Maryland),
    • • Dana Randall (Georgia institute of Technology),
    • • Robert Tempelman (Michigan State University),
    • • John Wilkes (Google Inc.);
  • ◦ Meet nationally renowned UIUC Big Data researchers and engage in discussions with speakers during the symposium and the reception.

Registration is free but required due to meal planning. Please register by September 8, 2016.

If you have any questions about the Symposium on Frontiers in Big Data, please contact Doris Bonnett (dbonnett@illinois.edu). For more information and the tentative agenda, please visit the Symposium website.

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Big Data for Health and Medicine Workshop — August 11, 2016

Written by Sophie Bui

Join us on August 11, 2016 for a workshop to discuss challenges in using big data for driving health and medicine at the University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Information Science & Technology! Our goal is to encourage discussion on challenges currently facing health-related industries with regards to data collection, gathering, storage, and analysis. We hope to bring together representatives from industry, government, non- profits, and academia to discuss the following current topics of interest for health and medicine:

  • • Wearables (FitBit, Jawbone UP, Polar)
  • • Quantified Self and IoT
  • • Predictive medicine
  • • Precision medicine
  • • Analytics for health
  • • Data collection & storage
  • • Data analysis
  • • Security concerns
  • • Collaboration
  • • Smart cities
  • • Food for health
  • • Reproducibility and robustness
  • • Data science
  • …and related topics

In the afternoon we will hold concurrent sessions. The Technical Track will consist of an Introduction to R workshop, designed for participants in industry, government, and non-profit with limited programming background, or with experience in other languages (SAS, SPSS) looking to investigate the open-source R language. This workshop will be free for the first 45 participants. The concurrent Breakout Track will provide opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and sharing their own personal challenges in dealing with data in health-related fields.

Registration is free for the first 45 participants!

Tentative Agenda

9:00A — Welcome and introduction
9:30A — Keynote – Tentative Topic: Big Data Challenges in Health-related Fields
10:30A — Coffee break
10:45A — Keynote – Tentative Topic: Team Science Approaches to Collaboration in Big Data
11:45A — Panel and lunch (*lunch is included with registration)
1:00P

Technical Track
Workshop: Intro to Data Analysis with R*
Audience: Beginner/Intermediate
*Limited to first 30 participants to sign up.

Breakout Track
A number of speakers will be joining us for discussions on high performance computing, green computing, analytics needs, and related topics.

4:00P-5:00P — Reception and Poster Session

Big Data for Health and Medicine Workshop

Thursday, August 11, 2016
9:00am-5:00pm
Peter Kiewit Institute — Omaha, NE

events, news, workshop

Midwest Big Data Summer School, June 20-24, 2016, Ames, IA

Written by Sophie Bui

The Midwest Big Data Summer School for Early Career Researchers will be held from June 20-24, 2016 in Ames, Iowa. This summer school is designed as a one week, intensive curriculum aimed at early career researchers to get them started in data-driven research. The school will include full day lectures on topics ranging from: data acquisition, data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, descriptive data analysis, data analysis tools and techniques, visualization and communication, ethical issues in data science, reproducibility and repeatability, and understanding of domain/context. The summer school is partially supported by the Midwest Big Data Hub, by the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, by the ISU Office of the Vice President of Research, and by the ISU Department of Computer Science.

Midwest Big Data Summer School
June 20-24, 2016
Morrill Hall, Iowa State University
Ames, IA
http://mbds.cs.iastate.edu/

Registration

There is no cost to attend but you must register by Wednesday, June 1 at 5:00pm to reserve your space. There is limited space so send your registration soon.

Travel Support

We have limited amount of travel support available for non-ISU participants. To be considered for travel support, please register by May 24 at 5:00pm and apply for travel support. Application details are available at http://mbds.cs.iastate.edu/.

We look forward to welcoming you in Ames, Iowa this June 2016. Any questions about the summer school should be sent to Hridesh Rajan, hridesh@iastate.edu. Please do feel free to circulate this to your colleagues as you see fit.

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Digital Agriculture Spoke All-Hands Meeting – May 16-17, 2016

Written by Sophie Bui

Videos of the presentations are now available!

The 2016 Digital Agriculture Spoke All-Hands Meeting to be held on May 16-17 at the Scheman Building, Iowa State Center, Ames, Iowa. The Digital Agriculture Spoke of the Midwest Big Data Hub is devoted to building partnerships and resources that will address emerging Big Data issues in the agricultural ecosystem.

Stakeholders from academia, industry, government, and other organizations will engage in interactive discussions about the partnerships and resources that will be needed to address the challenges in collecting, managing, serving, mining, and analyzing rapidly growing and increasingly complex data and information collections to create actionable knowledge and guide decision-making in agriculture.

Events will include presentations by Midwest Big Data Hub and national leadership; industry panel presentations and Q&A; participant lightning talks; and breakout sessions to discuss existing projects and to develop ideas and partnerships for new projects; and a poster session and reception.

Early career researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate students are encouraged to attend. There is no registration fee for this meeting.

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UND Early Career Big Data Summit – April 6-8

Written by Sophie Bui
1 Comment

The University of North Dakota (UND) will host an Early Career Big Data Summit (ECBDS) April 6-8, 2016. This Big Data event seeks to provide a venue for early career Big Data researchers (graduate students, post docs, and pre-tenure faculty) to connect with Industry, third-sector volunteer groups, and established researchers. Events will include multiple industry panel discussions, researcher lightning talks, and a hands-on application hack-a-thon. The Summit is expected to have representation from the Digital/Precision Agriculture, Transportation, Social Media, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems industries.

The summit will be co-located with the 47th Annual UND Writers Conference, whose theme this year is “The Art of Science” (AoS). In addition to Summit events, all attendees will be allowed to attend all AoS events—including Keynote presentations by Brian Greene (string theorist, author of The Elegant Universe, and entertaining communicator of cutting-edge scientific concepts) and award winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. While the entire AoS schedule is available on the UND Writers Conference website, additional AoS events include: 1) the Greene post-keynote social event at the North Dakota Museum of Art, and 2) the Thursday afternoon Prairie Public Radio interview and audience question/answer session with Brian Greene on the topic of “How to communicate science to a popular audience.”

The ECBDS has no registration fees, but registration is required for those seeking participant support and/or wishing to participate in hosted panels, lightning talks, or the hack-a-thon. Attendees will be responsible for their own meals, lodging, and travel. A limited amount of participant support is available to registered summit attendees only—preference is given to Big Data Summit presenters. More registration information is available through the ECBDS website.

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