Author: Sam Grabus

The LEADS-4-NDP 2019 fellowship program kicked off this week with a 3-day data science boot camp at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. Eleven fellows from iSchools across the U.S. are paired with nine National Digital Platform partner sites for 10-week remote internships to address data science challenges.

Boot camp sessions included big data management; metadata; data pre-processing; data visualization; data mining and machine learning; large-scale and parallel computing, and automated data analytics tools. As part of the boot camp, LEADS mentors OCLC’s Jean Godby and DCIC’s Richard Marciano shared about data science opportunities at their institutions; And LEADS mentors Steven Dilliplane, Academy of Natural Sciences, and Peter Logan, Temple University’s Digital Scholarship Center, participated in boot camp activities.

Read more about the LEADS program HERE.

Congratulations to MRC’s Amy Opalek, PhD, who successfully defended her dissertation, “Metadata for the International Health Workforce: Professional Regulation, Credentialing, and Health Policy Planning.”

Date: Thursday, 5/16
Time: 3:30pm
Location: Room 1005

Committee:

• Dr. Jane Greenberg, chair
• Dr. Erjia Yan
• Dr. Xia Lin
• Dr. Gail Rosen, ECE
• Dr. Karthik Ram, UC Berkeley

Title: Reproducible Computational Research in Bioinformatics: A Study of Tools and Metadata to Bind the Analytic Stack

Abstract: Reproducible computational research (RCR), and the “reproducibility crisis” continues to attract attention in a number of scientific disciplines. In this proposal, I represent reproducibility in terms of cohesiveness in the “analytic stack” comprising raw input data, tools, workflows, analyses, and publications. I review a number of existing major case study types – reproduction, replication, refactor, robustness test, survey, census, and case narrative. Of particular interest are refactors, in which an existing analysis with abstract methods is reimplemented by a third party. This proposal will identify three studies to be refactored, the state-of-the-art tools and standards to be applied, and how these attempts will be evaluated by external reviewers. The process of the refactor can be used to evaluate the limitations of reproducibility using conventional tools. From the refactor and survey I will identify persistent gaps in the “analytic stack”, and describe features of metadata solutions that can be used to address these deficiencies.

• LEADS-4-NDP is moving into 2019:
  • Jane Greenberg and Xia Lin presented about the LEADS fellowship as part of the CNI Spring Briefing. Presentation slides here.
  • A few of the 2018 and 2019 LEADS fellows met at iConference 2019 at the University of Maryland.

• MRC was active at the Research Data Alliance’s 13th plenary meeting in Philadelphia, PA. Several students from MRC and Drexel CCI volunteered at RDA.
  

Date: Thursday, April 18th
Time: 11am
Location: The Quorum
3675 Market Street
2nd Floor, Q4B
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Presenter: Richard Marciano, University of Maryland, College Park

The  Metadata Research Center is proud to present a lecture from Dr. Richard Marciano (Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Digital Curation Innovation Center) as part of the 2019 Distinguished Speaker Series:

“Developing a Computational Framework for Library and Archival Education”

Abstract: The Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) at the University of Maryland’s iSchool, along with international partners, are exploring the foundation and building blocks for an integrated library and archival educational curriculum centered on computational treatments of large complex collections. This is designed to prepare the next generation of librarians and archivists to meet the evolving needs of professionals working with digital collections. The talk will discuss the latest developments in this space, with big cultural data examples, and present opportunities for collaboration.

Second year IS doctoral student Sam Grabus will be presenting to librarians and staff at Temple University on current, NEH supported research with Temple University’s Digital Scholarship Center (DSC). Sam will be discussing her Summer 2018 LEADS-4-NDP fellowship project and new research on the DSC’s 19th-Century Knowledge Project.

Date/Time: Monday, February 25th, 1pm
Location: Temple University’s Digital Scholarship Center,
Ground Floor of Paley Library (1210 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122).
For detailed directions to get to the DSC, visit this page.

More information about Sam’s research and her presentation slide deck can be found on her website.

The Metadata Research Center and Women in Computing Initiative are co-sponsoring the CCI Distinguished Speaker Series guest for LOVE Data week , 2019. This year’s speaker is computer scientist Dr. Francine Berman, who will be discussing the challenges and opportunities in developing the Internet of Things (IoT).

Date/Time:
Wednesday February 13th, 11am-1:00pm

Location:
George D. Behrakis Grand Hall – North
Creese Student Center
3210 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

For more details, speaker bio, and event registration: Visit CCI event page

On October 25th, Jeremy Leipzig, Software Developer and IS PhD student presented research to the Drexel GIS Users Group about Reproducible Research Tools, including:

– Software dependency management using Conda
– Pipeline frameworks Snakemake and Nextflow
– Quilt “data as a dependency” framework
– Live web-enabled Jupyter notebooks with Binder

A video of the presentation can be viewed here.