COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE

By: Cynthia Dillon, SDSC Communications and Kimberly Mann Bruch, West Hub To mitigate the threat of massive wildfires, fire managers and first responders can set small controllable fires ahead of time to reduce flammable materials. West Hub member Ilkay Altintas, chief data science officer and director of the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, is principal investigator of a new National Science Foundation-funded project coined BurnPro3D. Leading a nation-wide t

Transboundary aquifers, which are deep subsurface water sources shared by multiple countries, have long been a critical source of water for communities along the borders of the U.S. and Mexico. A recent decline in water levels and quality – coupled with increased use – provoked concern regarding long-term sustainability of several transboundary aquifers shared by the U.S. and Mexico. To better understand the underlying issues and assist with solutions, the National Science Fo

Organized by the CloudBank project partners at the University of Washington (UW), UC Berkeley, the University of California San Diego and co-hosted by the West Big Data Innovation Hub, the inaugural Research Running on Cloud Compute and Emerging Technologies workshop (RRoCCET21) recently took place with university participants, commercial cloud providers, federal agencies and the private sector. Shava Smallen (SDSC) demonstrates the account management dashboard of the CloudBa

For more than 45 years, the Society for Advancement of Advancing Chicano/Hispanic and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) has supported an array of activities related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) inclusion programming. Recently, Dr. Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-She Kills presented at the SACNAS “Achieving True Diversity in STEM” webinar and the West Hub was fortunate to participate and gain valuable insight from her talk. Dr. Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-S

Have you ever wondered how the “normal” resting heart rate for your age group, used by your doctor, was determined or how the American Diabetes Association established the “normal” fasting glucose value? Establishing these “normal” ranges for metabolic data has presented challenges for medical researchers, practitioners, and those that share the information with the public for many years. Understanding these “normal” ranges for metabolism is complex, especially because the hu

An Yan, who received her doctorate degree in information science at the University of Washington (UW) earlier this year, and Bill Howe, UW Information School faculty member and West Hub co-principal investigator, recently presented EquiTensors: Learning Fair Integrations of Heterogeneous Urban Data at the 2021 International Conference on Data Management. Howe and Yan shared results from their studies on increasing fairness in urban data regarding mobility and transportation –

This piece was written by: Alice Lei, Research Experience for High School Students, West Hub Intern, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego – The New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NM WRRI) recently held a workshop that not only aimed to raise awareness of the severe water crises affecting tribes, pueblos and nations within and bordering New Mexico but also to foster future collaborations, emphasizing the importance of tribal perspectives in water managemen

Oregon State University Echohydrologist Carlos Ochoas has spent his career examining how watersheds and riparian systems work and ways to improve their quality. This illustration shows an example location of multiple soil, water, and vegetation monitoring stations he and his team installed along the Oak Creek watershed, near Corvallis, Oregon, with the goal of evaluating land use-environment relationships in various agroecologic settings. Streamflow and water quality paramete

Around this time last year, in May 2020, West Hub affiliate Michael Barton and colleagues published an open letter in Science that urged worldwide scientists to share their COVID-19 models and openly publish their code so that it was Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). While it’s difficult to prove that this letter stimulated epidemiologists to make their work more transparent, the year 2020 brought more than 56,000 unique visitors to Barton’s social and

Chris Turner, who has been working on an array of National Science Foundation-funded data science projects in Alaska for many years, recently spoke with West Hub science writer Kim Bruch about his management of environmental systems data, strategies on implementing FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) data principles, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted his work. Chris is a data librarian in Anchorage, Alaska, at Axiom Data Science, whic

As we wrap up the Let’s Make it COUNT initiative, we wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the winning entries and ALL the participants who made this effort such a rewarding experience. When we first started this journey, we set out to partner with the Census Bureau’s Statistics in Schools program, and create a Data Competition for High School Students to coincide with the 2020 Census. Our original plan was to create an in-person engagement model inspired by the 1300+ C

Los Angeles native Cindy Chen grew up in a stereotypical concrete-laden urban community. As a West Big Data Innovation Hub Spoke graduate student researcher, Cindy has been working on a project with City Plants to change the landscape of LA inner-city areas. Specifically, she’s using GIS tools to help City Plants and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office to plant more than 90,000 trees and increase tree canopy cover by 50 percent throughout many low-income communities. “Mayor Garce

A Conversation with Dr. Khadijia Monk and Dr. Theodoric Manley West Big Data Innovation Hub writer Kim Bruch recently sat down with Dr. Khadija Monk and Dr. Theodoric (Ted) Manley to reflect on Black History Month and the role of big data in their research and work. Monk and Manley, participants with the California State University—Los Angeles Spoke Project entitled Big Data to Promote Community Learning and Impact, have been working with students on using big data to explore

A few months ago, the West Big Data Innovation Hub teamed with the Border Solutions Alliance for the COVID-19 Data Challenge to broaden awareness of pandemic risk levels among border communities. One of the teams consisted of graduate students from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and their project has been used by an array of citizens throughout the state to assess the probability of exposure to COVID-19 in school classrooms. “Our project was developed as a web-

Multiple universities throughout the western U.S. have recently teamed for a four-year National Science Foundation (NSF) project focused on detailed simulations for an array of life science research efforts. Led by the University of Wyoming, the project has been designed to build and test computational models representing an array of biological processes. Additional participants hail from the University of Montana and the University of Nevada-Reno. “This project and our Data

While higher education institutions throughout the world went to online learning formats due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, New Mexico State University (NMSU) was no different. This West Big Data Innovation Hub affiliate, however, did one thing differently from many universities: they held a conference to better determine how to ensure that their most vulnerable students were able to continue their educational endeavors. “With support from the Improving Undergraduate

For more than two decades, Russell Poldrack has dedicated his career to studying the human brain – including the analysis of detailed brain imaging coupled with clinical, psychological, and genetic datasets. Poldrack has recently started working with the West Big Data Innovation Hub on a project that enables collecting, sharing, and analyzing very large datasets. Building upon the OpenNeuro project, which provides researchers with the ability to easily upload and share neuroi

Together with The Carpentries, the West Big Data Innovation Hub is excited to host a hands-on training workshop for community members to become certified Carpentries instructors. This opportunity is open to residents of the West Region states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming). Recipients of the training will be expected to host an online workshop for their local geographic region, in coll

While researchers race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, communities along the U.S.-Mexico border have been hard hit by the pandemic. The West Big Data Innovation Hub recently collaborated with the Border Solutions Alliance to conduct a COVID-19 Data Challenge. Three dozen faculty members and community partners supported the effort, holding office hours, giving lightning talks, and judging the pitch competition. A total of 33 teams composed of students, researchers, and communit

–Cal State LA and City of Los Angeles Collaborate on Summer Scholar Programs– This summer, the City of Los Angeles Data Team worked with Community Partners and California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA) College of Natural and Social Sciences to continue their efforts to promote big data literacy among local college students and underserved communities. The community-driven activities were a continuation of a National Science Foundation-funded three-year project co