2021 Activities Report, Summaries of Database Management Systems (DBMS)

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2021 Activities Report

Empowering people

to better design and

tackle data-rich

research projects

CONTENTS

About the Data Science Hub

Meet the Facilitators and Steering Committee

Our Connections

Coding Meetup

Teaching Tech & Instructors

Community Events: Research Bazaar & ML+X

By the Numbers

Future Goals

MEET THE DATA SCIENCE HUB

Chris Endemann Data Science Facilitator Data Science Hub Steering Committee Laura Albert, Industrial and Systems Engineering Victor Cabrera, Animal and Dairy Sciences Department Cameron Cook, Libraries & Research Data Services Russell Dimond, Social Sciences Computing Cooperative Michael Ferris, Computer Sciences & Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Iain McConnell, Data Science Institute & Space Science Engineering Center Lauren Michael, Center for High Throughput Computing Michael Newton, Statistics & Biostatistics and Medical Informatics Departments Amanda Smith, Industrial and Systems Engineering Whitney Sweeney, Data Science Institute Brian Yandell, Data Science Institute & Statistics Department Clare Michaud Data Science Facilitator Sarah Stevens Data Science Facilitator Michael Ferris Data Science Hub Director

OUR CONNECTIONS &

ENGAGEMENTS

The Data Science Hub’s facilitative work relies on strong connections with other data science and research support professionals at UW-Madison, in the Madison community, and at other institutions. In addition to the Data Science Institute and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, here’s a look at groups that the Data Science Hub collaborated or engaged with in 2021:

• UW-Madison Libraries
• Ebling Library & Health Science Learning Center
• Research Data Services
• DoIT’s Research Cyberinfrastructure group
• Department of Applied Agricultural Economics
• Department of Plant Pathology
• Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
• UW-Madison Office of Sustainability
• Center for High Throughput Computing
• Tiny Earth (Wisconsin Institute for Discovery)
• UW-Madison Carpentries Community
• Midwest Carpentries Community
• Global Carpentries Community
• Marquette University
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

TEACHING TECH: WORKSHOPS

Since 2019, the Data Science Hub has been hosting Carpentries workshops for the UW-Madison campus community, carrying on work started by the Advanced Computing Initiative and then the Center for High-Throughput Computing. Hosted by the Data Science Hub, organizing and teaching at these workshops is community-driven, supported by dozens of instructors from across campus, with a range of subject-area expertise. During 2021, the 15 workshops that the Data Science Hub hosted reached all levels of researchers from departments on-campus and organizations outside of the University. The workshops centered around the subject areas of ecology, health sciences, social sciences, and geospatial science, with the shared goal of showing researchers best practices for data management, data creation, and software development. Workshop topics taught for the first time in 2021 were Introductions to Machine Learning and Interactive Data Visualization. The Data Science Hub also had the opportunity to teach the broader com- munity: a workshop on GitHub was offered through ForwardFest. [The workshops] introduced me to tools I use in my day-to-day research and work. My attending the workshops has given me confidence to take my research beyond the methods that are commonly employed in my field. For example, I continued my data collection through the worst of the pan- demic thanks to some retooling of Qualtrics. — Erwin Lares, PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

TEACHING INSTRUCTION

In addition to providing trainings in foundational computational skills, the Data Science Hub, as the UW-Madison Carpentries Community’s home, trains new Carpentries instructors in interactive and evidence-based peda- gogy to teach researchers how to apply data science methods and tools to their work. This training proves to be useful for people with teaching expe- rience and people new to teaching alike. Through Instructor Training, the local Carpentries Community grows, and the trained instructors are able to bring what they learn into their own educational spaces — be they class- rooms, libraries, or one-on-one consultations. The Data Science Hub host- ed two instructor trainings in 2021, training 8 new UW-Madison-affiliated instructors. The instructor training provided me with fundamental educational background, lesson design strategies, and techniques to use in workshop-style teaching. Even though I am a professional educator, the instructor training was the first time I was taught very basic concepts like different types of assessment strategies, Bloom’s taxonomy, and how to design learning objectives. I learned how to guide learners through a live demonstration of a technical task and how to make the educational environment welcoming to all. The instructor training had numerous impacts on my teaching, both on the formal courses I teach and the Machine Learning for Biology workshop my research group created. When moving CS 540: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to an online format for the Fall 2020 semester, I used my experience from instructor training to restructure the lecture format. My co-instructors and I introduced extensive formative assessments, for instance, using short quiz questions in between lecture segments to check students’ progress and understanding. In addition, I used my improved understanding of learning objectives when working with colleagues in the BMI department to develop a new course proposal for BMI/CS 775: Computational Network Biology, which was approved in Fall 2021. — Anthony Gitter, Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics

COMMUNITY EVENTS:

RESEARCH BAZAAR

The Data Science Hub hosted its second Data Science Research Bazaar in 2021, with the theme of Data Science for the Social Good. Throughout February, presenters and attendees learned from each other during lightning talks, posters, science-inspired artwork, discussions, and workshops that addressed data science’s intersections with racism, health and the environment, and cities. The Research Bazaar is an annual event to bring together members of the UW-Madison campus and the surrounding community to exchange ideas and knowledge about data. From hosting this event repeatedly, the Data Science Hub has fostered connections among researchers and data scien- tists. In 2021, a mix of 350 individuals participated as presenters and at- tendees, including undergraduate students, graduate students, post-docs, staff and faculty members, industry employees, and community members. The photo to the right was taken at our first Data Science Research Bazaar, in January 2020.

COMMUNITY EVENTS: ML+X

The Data Science Hub has been able to grow in new directions in 2021, including with providing more robust support around machine learning. Through forming the Machine Learning Community of Practice, the Data Science Hub aims to support and connect machine learning practitioners at UW-Madison. A new regularly occurring event for the campus community that the Data Science Hub and the Machine Learning Community of Practice host is ML+X. Once a month, the Machine Learning Community of Practice gathers for ML+X’s short presentations, where researchers and data scientists share their projects and use cases for machine learning techniques and tools. Each month, researchers and data scientists gather on Zoom for ML+X.

FUTURE GOALS

In 2022, the Data Science Hub looks forward to building on previous years’ work to expand its services and reach more members of the UW-Madison campus and the local community. The activities that the Data Science Hub initiates and maintains reflects its Strategic Goals for 2020-2023:

1. Build data science competency among researchers

The Data Science Hub hosts at least 15 training workshops each year. In 2022, new workshop topics will include text analysis for the humanities and deep learning, and lesson development.

2. Foster real-time engagement and collaboration

The Data Science Hub is hosting its 3rd annual Research Bazaar, continuing to host Coding Meetup twice a week, and has intro- duced a lightning talk series on machine learning, ML+X.

3. Connect researchers to resources and collaborators

The Facilitators reach researchers across campus by presenting at department seminars and new student orientations, and making up-to-date resources for research projects widely available.

4. Strengthen relationships with resource providers

The Data Science Hub has maintained relationships with frequent collaborators, and forged new ones: dataiku, Snowflake, and WARF are all new sponsors of the 2022 Research Bazaar.

5. Promote activities of the Data Science Hub and cam-

pus data science ecosystem

“Data Science Updates,” the Data Science Hub’s newsletter reaches almost 1400 subscribers with data science opportunities. The Facilitators present at conferences on campus and nationally to share the Data Science Hub’s work.