27 August 2025
Shaily Gandhi (Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at IT:U), Neema Sumari (Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania), and Felix Emeka Anyiam (University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria)
This August 2025, the ICTP in Trieste, Italy, hosted a special edition of the CODATA-RDA Advanced Workshop on Research Data Science, celebrating a decade of collaboration. What made this milestone even more meaningful was that three of us, Shaily Gandhi, Neema Simon Sumari, and Felix Emeka Anyiam, were once students at these schools in 2016 and 2017. Shaily and Neema first met as students at the CODATA-CNIC Training Workship in Beijing in 2016, and the following year, all three of us crossed paths in the 2017 Summer School. Over time, through continuous collaborative efforts and initiatives, we transitioned from being students to returning as tutors for this 10th anniversary edition.
The journey of the Urban Data Science Summer School is rooted in the collaborations that began at the CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School in Trieste. Shaily Gandhi and Neema Sumari first graduated from the CODATA-CNIC Training Workshop in 2016, and the following year, they met Felix Emeka Anyiam at the 2017 CODATA-RDA Summer school in Trieste. It was here that the foundations for future collaboration were laid, leading to the launch of the first Urban Data Science Summer School in 2018. Building on that success, the second edition was hosted by the Summer–Winter School at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India, from May 13 to May 23, 2019. These schools reflect not only the growth of an academic program but also the strength of international collaboration that has continued to evolve since those early connections in Trieste.
source : https://shailygandhi.github.io/UrbanDataScience2019/
This year Urban Data Science school created a unique program that combined computational infrastructure with urban analytics and geospatial applications. This year, we embedded the computational infrastructure track into the urban data science curriculum, a decision that brought a rich interdisciplinary dimension. This integration allowed participants not only to gain technical skills, scaling their analyses from laptops to HPC clusters and cloud platforms, but also to apply these methods to real-world urban challenges. From geospatial analysis and remote sensing to urban mobility and health applications, the workshop underscored the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in the urban domain.
The Urban Data Science curriculum was curated and developed by Shaily Gandhi (ITU Linz, Austria), Neema S. Sumari (Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania), and Felix Emeka Anyiam (University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria). Compute Infrastructure was taught by Robert Quick (Indiana University, USA) and Raphael Cóbe (UNESP, Brazil).
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