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April  2019 "What's the Hubbub"

Purdue Intercultural Learning Center Flourishes

Purdue’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR) has turned to HUBzero, to better achieve their mission of bringing intercultural learning into the classroom and publishing research in the field.

Intercultural learning, which focuses on preparing students to learn from and work with people from other cultures, is increasingly important in a global society. CILMAR, which was founded in 2016, works with faculty to introduce their students to intercultural learning through a variety of different educational tools. In turn, CILMAR’s intercultural learning specialists collect data about which tools work best in various situations.

Before collaborating with HUBzero, CILMAR staff members were trying to keep track of all that data in a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet, explains Annette Benson, communication strategist and intercultural learning specialist for CILMAR. They needed a way to make the data more manageable, as well as more accessible to the public.

The HUBzero team helped launch the Intercultural Learning Hub (HubICL), that eliminated the Excel spreadsheet and created an easy-to-use interface where users can search for intercultural learning tools by a variety of attributes (for example, the intercultural development of the audience or the facet of intercultural learning to be taught). Wherever possible, links to the materials are provided, and the graphical interface lets users easily add their own tools to the database.

The finished HubICL isn’t just a place for the CILMAR team to store and categorize the tools they use. It also contains a forum and collection section where intercultural learning specialists can meet and connect with one another and a research repository where people can share white papers and presentations related to intercultural learning.

Now, when Benson gives presentations at conferences, she can steer attendees toward all of the resources and research behind her presentation with a single link to the HubICL.


Read the full article: https://www.itap.purdue.edu/newsroom/190311_HubICL.html
Writer:  Adrienne Miller, technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP)

 

Next HUBzero Community Meeting on April 24th

The next community meeting will be held April 24th, 2019 from 2-3 pm ET (11 am PT). For more information, visit hubzero.org - Upcoming Events. 

 

2.2.15 Release Notes

The HUBzero development team has scheduled the next release, 2.2.15, to go out to No Hassle hubs on Sunday, April 7th. With this update there were some significant changes, including but not limited to:

  • Courses can be copied from the front-end by a course manager or instructor
  • Any prior revision to a wiki page in "Wiki - Page History" can now be set to "current", effectively allowing a page to be reverted to an older state.
  • Added Create, Read, Update, and Delete methods for to Projects API
  • Namespace in core javascript changed to "Hubzero" as an effort to remove Joomla dependency.
    • Note for developers: Joomla compatibility will be removed in a later release. Update your code as soon as possible.

More details can be found at help.hubzero.org/documentation/220/releasenotes/2215. 

 

March  2019 "What's the Hubbub"

Gateways 2019 - Call for Participation 

San Diego, California 
September 23–25, 2019
http://sciencegateways.org/gateways2019/call

Gateways 2019 is now accepting submissions of papers, demos, tutorials, and panels (2–4 pages) on the topic of gateways for science, engineering, or other disciplines. Gateways are user-friendly interfaces to scientific computing, data, and other domain-specific resources to support research and education.

Topics may include their design, use, impact, development processes, sustainability, best practices, or any other aspect that you think fellow gateway creators or users will find interesting to learn. We also welcome educational topics directed toward the next generation of gateway creators. In addition, this year Gateways 2019 is co-located with the eScience conference. The two conferences will offer shared sessions and connected registration.

Abstracts are due April 29, and full submissions are due May 6, 2019. A poster session deadline (open to all attendees) will be August 15.

Read more details in the Call for Participation: http://sciencegateways.org/gateways2019/call

 

Next HUBzero Community Meeting April 24th

Over 25 HUBzero community members joined our call on January 23rd. Listen to the meeting on YouTube or check out the slide deck all available on help.hubzero.org - HUBzero Community Meetings. The next community meeting will be held April 24th, 2019 from 2-3 pm ET (11 am PT). For more information, visit hubzero.org - Upcoming Events. 

 

2.2.14 Release Notes 

The HUBzero development team has released the latest update, 2.2.14. With this update there were some significant changes, including but not limited to:

  • Moving inline JavaScript to JS files and Mootools libraries being deprecated
  • Updated the media manager and adjusted most components to use media manager settings, except support, projects, and publications
  • Browser support for Internet Explorer will now only be IE11 or greater 

More details can be found at help.hubzero.org/documentation/220/releasenotes. 

February 2019 "What's the Hubbub"

HUBzero powers Social Media Macroscope, making social media data analysis available to anyone

As social media sites like Twitter and Facebook explode in popularity, researchers in a variety of fields are turning to social media for data to study. But although plenty of social media analytics tools exist, they’re not always accessible to those without a computational science background.

Social Media Macroscope, an environment powered by Purdue’s open-source HUBzero platform, presents a solution to that problem – users simply log onto the site and use data analytics tools through a web interface, no coding required. Instead of having to write a program to access and parse data from a site such as Twitter, obtaining the relevant data is as simple as entering in search terms.

“We could have built a whole environment for ourselves, but it just didn’t make sense when we saw that HUBzero had already done that for us at a very low cost,” says Joseph Yun, Social Media Macroscope’s principal investigator and the leader of the Social Research and Technology Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As participants in HUBzero’s No Hassle Hub option, the Social Media Macroscope team has relied on customization and support from the HUBzero team. “Everything’s been taken care of very promptly,” says Yun of HUBzero’s ticketing support system.

Social Media Macroscope isn’t just for data science novices. It’s also a place where computational scientists can share the models they’ve created and make them available to non-experts. 

Yun cites the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) as an example of a tool that’s reached a wider audience through Social Media Macroscope. As code sitting on GitHub, it wasn’t accessible to non-programmers. But with Social Media Macroscope, using VADER is as simple as selecting the tool from a drop-down menu and pressing the ‘run’ button.
 

Writer:  Adrienne Miller, technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Full article: HUBzero powers Social Media Macroscope, making social media data analysis available to anyone

January 2019 "What's the Hubbub"

How one workshop will impact your Hub's goals, team, and career

Set a goal this year to attend a Science Gateways Bootcamp, offered by the Science Gateways Community Institute. Step away from your day-to-day management tasks, and spend time with your team during this Incubator-organized Bootcamp. 

During this week-long intensive workshop, the instructors ask big questions. What is your funding model? How do your users see value in your gateway or Hub? The Bootcamp covers areas that you might not have had time to consider.

Hub teams Aquavit, Canarie, EcologyPlus, MyGeoHub, nanoHUB, PlantingScience, QUBESHub, Social Media Macroscope, and VIDIA have taken advantage of the Bootcamp and have significantly benefited from the experience in different ways.

  • Catrina Adams from PlantingScience said that the Bootcamp provided tools that she will use the rest of her career. 
  • Jeanette Sperhac said that the benefits of the Bootcamp for her when she spent the week working on VIDIA related to developing a long-term view of the project priorities, goals, and next steps. Jeanette said, “we learned together that we’re all engaged in the same sort of work, just at different phases.”
  • Joe Yun, the PI of Social Media Macroscope, said that his Bootcamp experience kick-started his career, “This may sound like an exaggeration, but I genuinely believe that the SGCI Bootcamp started me on a career trajectory that I could never have imagined as I was going through my doctorate education. What I am doing now is so exciting, and it all started with my eyes being opened to a new possibility for my career during the Bootcamp.”


Sign your team up for the next Bootcamp, which will be May 13th-17th, 2019 in Indianapolis, IN. Apply through the online form to take advantage of this excellent opportunity: https://sciencegateways.org/engage/bootcamp/apply. Applications are due by March 22nd, 2019.

December 2018 "What's the Hubbub"

OneSciencePlace to Launch on December 13th!

The loss of funding or end of a grant can have adverse impacts on a research community. OneSciencePlace gives your research community life beyond a funding cycle. OneSciencePlace is a preserve for research communities, databases, software applications, and publications, which will officially launch on December 13th. Users of OneSciencePlace can join one community or partner with multiple communities to share data across disciplines.

With OneSciencePlace, you gain access to community spaces where you can discuss amongst your peers, download open access data, publish new discoveries, and run simulations. Other amenities, such as connection to various file systems, will be provided on OneSciencePlace with more to come.

OneSciencePlace is built by the team that brought you the HUBzero platform, a powerful content management system built to support scientific activities, and operated by the HUBzero Foundation.

Your hub, science gateway, or active learning community can move into OneSciencePlace by writing OneSciencePlace into your current funding budget as your sustainability solution. Contact us for more information by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

November 2018 "What's the Hubbub"

NSF awards $4.5 million grant to build a platform for geospatial data management 

A team led by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) Research Computing Senior Research Scientist Carol Song has been awarded a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a “plug and play” platform to allow researchers to easily access and process geospatial data.

Song describes GeoEDF as a successor to the Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs), a project Song led that developed web-based geospatial data visualization, analysis, and modeling tools and made them accessible to users on the science gateway MyGeoHub. GABBs is open source and is available to anyone, regardless of affiliation with Purdue. A geospatial gateway enabled by GABBs software can be set up on cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services.

Despite the advent of geospatial data processing tools accessible even to non-programmers, data challenges remain in this area. Many geospatial data repositories lack standard interfaces and don’t provide data in a way that researchers can immediately use. Moreover, as field sensors become increasingly common, large volumes of streaming data are created, including so-called “crowdsourced” data generated by citizen scientists. GeoEDF’s data processing pipeline will help researchers retrieve and process only the data they need, and transform it into standardized formats.

Song has a number of scientists as co-principal investigators who will serve as use cases for GeoEDF. One of her co-PIs, Jian Jin, an assistant professor at Purdue Unversity of agricultural and biological engineering, is developing a handheld crop scanner that will allow farmers to get information about the health of their plants just by scanning a leaf. GeoEDF will include a way to automatically upload and store the data generated by use of these sensors, as well as data analysis tools that can be used to study plant health and growth.

Song’s other co-PIs are:

  • Venkatesh Merwade, a professor of civil engineering, who will use GeoEDF for flood modeling with a state-of-the-art hydrologic model.
  • Uris Baldos, a research assistant professor in agricultural economics, who will use GeoEDF to integrate socio-economic data with environmental data to study the consequences of changing land use.
  • Jack Smith, a senior research staff member of the Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences at Marshall University, who will use GeoEDF to process water quality data from field sensors in Appalachia and convert it into standard EPA format for processing.

GeoEDF will have interoperability with other national geospatial cyberinfrastructures, including Hydroshare, an open source system for sharing hydrologic data and models. This interoperability will ensure users can seamlessly leverage the capabilities of different infrastructures. Like MyGeoHub, GeoEDF will be built on HUBzero.
 

Writer:  Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Full article: https://www.itap.purdue.edu/newsroom/180918_GeoEDF.html