This Workshop is convened by WDS, in collaboration with the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the São Paulo Research Foundation, and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). It builds on the success of the First Latin America and Caribbean Workshop in 2018 that explored the data landscape in the region to understand the opportunities and challenges, and discussed how data initiatives could be supported by WDS. The Second Workshop will continue discussions on data management best practices for data repositories and on new trends and perspectives for scientific data systems. However, there will also be a greater emphasis on analyzing and finding concrete solutions to the technical, political, and infrastructure issues identified during the First Workshop.

We invite all researchers and scientists currently involved in scientific data management initiatives in the Latin American and the Caribbean region to present their experiences, research, operations, and projects or programmes at the Workshop. Abstracts for short oral presentations must be in English and should not exceed 3000 characters. The deadline for abstract submission is Friday, 31 January Sunday, 16 February.

Registration

Online registration is now open. The process is managed by FAPESP, who officially invite you here to join us in São Paulo.

REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

For more information on the Workshop, Call for Abstracts, and Registration, please see the Workshop website.

Open Data is going to help launch more startups. It’s going to help launch more businesses … It’s going to help more entrepreneurs come up with products and services that we haven’t even imagined yet”. (The former US President Barack Obama, May 9, 2013).

This is our CODATA 2019, Beijing, China Story: Richard Rimiru, Neema Sumari, Simon Mulwa and Gilbert Mushi.

We are “The 4 Musketters from East Africa”, Two Tanzanian from Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Neema Sumari and Gilbert Mushi and Two Kenyans; Richard Rimiru from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) and Simon Mulwa from Kenya Agricultral Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), at the time of writing.

The CODATA & CAS International Training Workshop on Scientific Big Data and Machine Learning was a great opportunity for us to work together along with other 21 other students from different countries in the world from different professional and academia backgrounds. The Training Workshop was amazing, we learned, practised and exchanged academic knowledge as well as building on our existing networks and expertise.

The workshop introduced us to various aspects of Scientific Big Data and Machine Learning with hands on experience: This has stimulated our sureness to start working with these concepts in our environments. We can now start looking into implementing Data science, Visualization, Machine learning and Artificial Neural Networks in our university curriculum & work environs.

The CODATA-CAS workshop in Beijing, China, in September 2019, was the best for us. We wanted to learn and meet new people, ideas and experience different cultures. We are thankfull to  CODATA and CAS for their genuine support in attaining these goals. It has been amongest the best experiences in our live’s. We created strong friendships that we hope we will be able to maintain over the next few years if not for lifetime.

As our friend “Batzaya” from Mongolia Would Say, “Wakanda Forever”, Then we say “CODATA Foever”.

The main activites in the training workshop were spread into two weeks of both class room and hands on experience. To mention afew; Data Visualization at Peking University by Professor Xiaoru Yuan  was an outstading and novelty which really crowned the training workshop. We look into the future of experiencing some novelty again and again if given the chance.

At the closing session ceremony, Dr. Simon Hodson, Executive Director of CODATA, asked the participants: “so, what have you learned? and what will you do next?” What we have learned was the idea of Open Science and its FAIR Data Principles was a major key to workshop and Conference. We’ve learned different issues on why data can be shared, how it can be analyzed, which data has long term value as well as benefits of storing, protecting, sharing, and publishing data among research scientists. It’s true that most of the researchers would like their data to be publicly stored and accessible by other researchers, however, this is not easy for researchers who do not have clearly defined ways to do this, or do not know, how to make their data accessible to others. Knowledge of data management plans for the hosting research institutes is required to ensure that researchers can define ways to store their datasets in a publicly accessible way after their experiments and publishing are done. Once the research data is stored in a publicly accessible manner, it then needs to be preserved in a format which can be reused by other researchers. In this workshop, the courses that were taught were: Programming-in-R, Cloud Computing, UNIX Shell, ggplot2, Data Visualisation, SQL, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Neural Networks, Particle accelerator, Research Computational Infrastructure, HOC and HTC, Research Data Management. These courses gave us very good skills and knowledge about Data Science which can help us to facilitate the sharing of data – it was great experience. The team understood why open access and data sharing is important in todays data space.

Lastly but not the least, was the wonderful arrangements done by Ms. Wang Ting in assisting us with any logistical challanges occurring during the practical sessions. This was an outstanding style from her.  It was one of the most enjoyable and informative moments of our lives.

Thanks to CODATA, and CAS for your support and as well as to all our fellow participants for making it possible and fun.

“We Meet, We Learn, We connect, We Fall in Love”
“The 4 Musketters from East Africa”.

This post is a syndicated copy of the one at http://eurodoc.net/news/2019/eurodoc-participated-in-the-1st-data-steward-school

Eurodoc Open Science ambassadors for France, Sothearath Seang (Policy Officer and Treasurer of Eurodoc) and Slovenia, Ana Slavec (Open Science Work Group Coordinator of Eurodoc) attended the Data Steward School that was held during the 4th edition of the CODATA-RDA Summer School for Research Data Science in Trieste, Italy on 5-16 August. The school is part of the FAIRsFAIR Initiative but unlike the previous editions of the summer school, this year’s edition included a pilot programme solely dedicated to data stewardship. Only five participants were selected to attend the program.

The International Conference on Smart Data, Smart Cities and Smart Governance being organised at CEPT University, Ahmedabad during October 3 –  5, 2019. This conference is an attempt to bring together Urban Stakeholders, information and communication technologies, and geospatial technologies experts under one umbrella for three days for exchanging ideas on ‘Smart City, ICT and Geospatial Technology based solutions for Smart Governance’. The brochure is attached herewith and more details of the conference is available on http://smartcities-cept.in/.

Download the conference flyer

Are you interested in the Research Infrastructures environment? Looking to enhance your knowledge and fine-tune your management skills? Apply now for an Executive MBA in Management of Research Infrastructures (30/9 deadline).

The Executive Masters in Management of Research Infrastructures is an international management development Programme tailored to the specific needs of Research Infrastructures. This Programme is designed to give experienced science professionals the skills and knowledge they need to take on greater managerial responsibilities.

Take the opportunity to improve your managerial skills attending the Full Master programme or single Modules, attending only specific courses on particular topics. You will have the chance to share your ideas with top scientists and managers in from all over Europe, such as Iain Mattaj (HT, Director General), Ivan Baines (MPI-CPG, Chief Operating Officer) and Jacques Demotes (ECRIN-ERIC).

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This article was first published by instructors Dr. Shaily R. Gandhi and Felix Emeka Anyiam https://shailygandhi.github.io/UrbanDataScience2019/ – Shaily and Felix are both alumni of the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science.

The second summer school on Urban Data Science was conducted following the successful completion of the first summer school on Urban Data Science in 2018 which is an outcome of the collaboration which took place at The CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School in Trieste, Italy 2017. This year the course Urban Data Science was hosted by the Summer Winter School CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India from May 13 – May 23, 2019.

With the upcoming trend of data driven solutions for use at the central level for making city operations more efficient and effective; the next generation of city planners will need to be as comfortable using advanced simulation algorithms as it is with design. This course helped to address the challenges with poor use of available open data in decision making while keeping urban in focus. This summer school course had been modified to get students started with the basic data science components in a short span of 10 days. This year the course had an additional 4 days which helped in making more insightful results from the open data sets that the last years 6 days course. Open data sets allows for a deeper understanding of the urban dynamics and its associated challenges, allowing the students to have a firmer control over possible bias and therefore analysing and giving solutions for overcoming these observed challenges.

The course this year was carefully modified with the feedback of students from the previous summer school of 2018, keeping in mind that the 24 new intakes are from different backgrounds like planning, architects, civil engineer, geomatics and other disciplines from both bachelors and masters level who belonged to IT and non- IT backgrounds. The curriculum covered basics of Git and Git hub, where students got an extremely intense hand on practical experience in using the software and learning how to open up their projects on GitHub. More over Open Refine, R and excel was covered for data cleaning. The lessons of the basics of R were prepared by using the material of software carpentry lessons Programming with R, R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis and Geospatial Data workshop. The concepts were taken from various sources and the lessons were redesigned focusing on urban problems and analysis.

The school begun with students understanding the concepts behind setting-up their study objectives towards enhanced conceptualized Research titles and using techniques to develop a research theory, planning the area of their study, thus bearing in mind the type of data available from Open data sets to be captured, whether continuous, discrete, ordinal or nominal data and the different stages of statistical analysis that can be conducted in other to produce the expected outcomes. Knowledge on research methodologies and implementation of statistical application software’s to support data analysis was one of the vital goals of the course. The Statistical software package called “R” was used as it has become a very powerful and useful tool for the purpose of data cleaning, management, statistical analysis and data graphical visualization. When mastered, this application is user friendly and could reduce the time and efforts of the researcher, student and professionals. The word cloud below shows the number of technology students had explored during the summer school.

Innovative teaching techniques like mixing theory and practical’s with real life examples were followed in this course as it had diverse students attending and it required a special attention to keep the whole class on the same pace. Despite the course being intense from morning 9:30am till evening 5:30pm, it was very motivating to see the students following up with the topics and catching up with the pace of the instructors. To better understand the various levels of the 24 students, we conducted a pre and post summer school survey which gave us an idea about how well the school has changed the perspective of the students for programming in R to being confident in using Git and OpenRefine. Daily feedback was taken from the students similar to the last years practice to enhance class activity decisions by tutors. Continuous constructive comments from the students made it more effective as the tutors were able to achieve the desired output by changing the teaching method according to the requirement of the students. This process of understanding the capability of the students was well appreciated and implemented.

Urban Data Science Summer School 2019 was well appreciated by the students and the outcomes of the course were very insightful with statistical evidence. The topics selected by the students and its frequency is shown in the below Word Cloud. Urban planning and decision making consists of insight—and this insights are collected and analysed using open data sets in other to know how things are in our environment today, which this course promoted deeply. The role of Urban Data Science is in enhancing Urban Planning and Policy-making with more data driven decisions which is in need at this time. The students of this summer school came up with wonderful insights and results. It was a great pleasure to receive outputs of the case study in various topics such as: Crime, the Economy, Education, Governance and Planning, Environment, Public Health, Road Accident, Sports, etc.

Linda Reeba Koshy, a student of the summer school’s project was a case study on the Prevalence of Obesity among Socially Vulnerable Groups in the United States, with interesting results proving that Obesity is prevalent among Ethnic/Racial minorities, and that socioeconomic, racial factors influence obesity in children and the elderly. Also, persons from Low income households and lower educational levels were more likely to be obese due to their poor dietary choices. A second study on analyzing the performance of Indian states and union territories in terms of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for the year 2018 by Kavina Mehta recommended from the analysis that Law Enforcement and Policy Interventions should be the first steps towards enhancing Indian’s sustainable development targets along with political willingness. The study on the Understanding of the Pattern of Terrorist Attacks in India by Pooja Toshniwal, concluded that more number of attacks are happening in Jammu and Kashmir using various types of weapons. This analysis of attacks helps in understanding the pattern of attacks which could be used by defence to halt future attacks. Contribution of Education in Development of countries across the world by Surabhi Samant threw more light on some of the un-expecting factors about the literacy rate which is significantly affected by child marriage, child labour, and poverty. There is no significant impact on government expenditure which means it is not about spending money but also the implementation of the right mechanism. This would be contextual to every country and its economic status. The study also concluded that the literacy rate has a significant impact on Human Development and Happiness Index of a country, and moderate impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In principle, education not only encourages economic growth but also assures quality life and overall development of a country. Many more interesting studies were carried out under this course. In conclusion, the inclusion of Urban Data Science in the SWS curriculum is priceless, as it brought an exponential improvement in the scholastic learning of the participants towards their data and spatial analytics enhancement via visualization and performance.

The Centre for Applied Geomatics (CAG), CRDF at CEPT University engages in technology advisory, research, consultancy, and capacity building activities.

Please find the attachment for the training offered by the Center for Applied Geomatics in the month of February 2019.

• 11 – 15 FEBRUARY, 2019 UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV / DRONE)

• 18 – 22 FEBRUARY, 2019 DATA SCIENCE with R