[ESIP-all] Call for Participation: NSF DataViz Hackathon for Polar CyberInfrastructure: NYC, November 3-4, 2014

[Mattmann, Chris A (3980) via ESIP-all]

The U.S. National Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop related
to data visualization in the Polar Sciences. The workshop will focus
on bridging the cyberinfrastructure/data visualization and polar
communities and it is scheduled to be held in New York City at the
Parsons New School for Design November 3-4, 2014.

Improving the use and the value of existing datasets over the Polar
Regions is crucial to promote science and support new discoveries.
Ultimately, collaborations between data visualization experts and
Polar scientists will foster a greater understanding of the
spatiotemporal dynamics at play in Polar Regions and their implications
to society.

The participants will be motivated by several public Polar datasets
that will made available before the starting date of the workshop.
One of the expected outcomes of the workshop is to produce high
impact novel prototypes and data visualizations that will be made
available under open source licenses. Releasing the prototypes will
allow the NSF to make longer-term investments in technologies and
visualizations that can be adopted by the community. The workshop
will also increase cross agency collaboration between NSF, NASA,
NOAA and other Polar-related agencies. The organizing committee is
composed by both cyberinfrastructure and Polar experts, including
participation from academia, industry, federally funded research
and development centers, and from the broader open source community.

The workshop will: 

(1) recommend several sets of open source software
for data and metadata processing; scientific workflow management;
data curation; and data dissemination;

(2) identify some relevant
Polar data visualization techniques and assess the needs and
challenges of visualizing Polar datasets;

(3) package, deliver, and
make available the outcomes of the workshop via a public website;
and;

(4) provide input to the NSF Polar CyberInfrastructure program
officer through a final report.

Travel support is available for around twenty-five workshop
participants that will be selected meritocratically based on
interest and based on recommendations from the community.

An organizing committee for the meeting is being formed,
with current membership listed below:

* Dr. Chris Mattmann, University of Southern California &
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

* Dr. Annie Bryant Burgess, University of Southern California

* Dr. Suzanne Carbotte, Columbia University

* Dr. Bruce Caron, New Media Research Institute

* Dr. Patrick Driscoll, Aalborg University

* Mr. Christopher Goranson, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping

* Mr. Aaron Hill, Parsons New School for Public Engagement

* Dr. Daniel Katz, National Science Foundation

* Dr. Martin Lehmanm, Aalborg University

* Dr. Alan Maceachren, Penn State University

* Dr. Jonathan Pundsack, University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center

* Dr. Marco Tedesco, National Science Foundation

* Mr. Joel Towers, Parsons New School

* Dr. Saskia Van Manen, Open University

* Dr. Alexander Lex, Harvard

Datasets for the workshop will be made publicly available
via the Cloud to workshop participants around two-weeks prior
to the start of the workshop. The workshop format
will consist of a 2-day series of invited speakers in
Polar Sciences and CyberInfrastructure and Data Visualization
to motivate the start of the art and challenges to the
community. Four interactive "hackathons" will provide the
opportunity for workshop participants to break off into
teams and develop novel data visualizations on the provided
Cloud datasets. Hackathon results will be shared and
disseminated during the workshop read out and will be
made available to the community under permissive open
source licenses (e.g., the Apache License, version 2).

Please reserve the dates in your calendars and we
welcome your inquiries about the workshop. Please
send email to the workshop committee at the following
address and we will respond promptly to your inquiries.

nsfdatavis at gmail.com

Thank you!

Cheers,
Chris Mattmann
(on behalf of the organizing committee)



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Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Chief Architect
Instrument Software and Science Data Systems Section (398)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
Office: 168-519, Mailstop: 168-527
Email: chris.a.mattmann at nasa.gov
WWW:  http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
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Adjunct Associate Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
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