Newsletter
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
October 2018 "What's the Hubbub"
EcologyPlus connects diverse college students and early career scientists with timely and relevant career opportunities
EcologyPlus offers students and recent graduates, from underrepresented minority groups, year-round mentoring and career resources. Led by Teresa Mourad, Ecological Society of America (ESA) and George Middendorf, Howard University, with a network of 13 other dedicated partners, the idea for EcologyPlus was inspired by ESA’s SEEDS program, a diversity mentoring program limited to undergraduates only. With EcologyPlus, mentoring and career resources are made available to undergraduate, graduate students and recent graduates. EcologyPlus also promotes a wide range of careers transcending academic research to include options in all sectors.
“When students and mentors register on the Hub, they indicate the interests they have on a checklist. This allows students to select a mentor based on their interests readily,” says Teresa Mourad. Teresa went on to say that, “through the mentorship program, mentors and mentees meet monthly by phone, video-call or, in-person, where feasible.” The EcologyPlus hub provides a career self-assessment tool and space to archive highlights of these conversations so that both mentor and mentee can track the progress of mentees’ career development goals. Students also have access to a list of ecology opportunities such as internships, workshops, and other networking opportunities. Soon, EcologyPlus will allow the program to issue digital badges for completing engagements that enhance their careers. For example, students are encouraged to share their science or research work with the public via channels like social media and can receive a badge if they demonstrate that they have completed this task.
“The platform allows us to combine a lot of different ideas, versus using different tools in different places,” says Teresa. She realized that HUBzero would provide the functionalities envisioned by the project while attending the first Science Gateways Bootcamp in April 2017. Fellow Bootcamp participants had recommended using the platform based on the needs of the program. Teresa used the Science Gateways Community Institutes’ Extended Development Support to set-up EcologyPlus and build several critical customized areas such as the career development goals and the “Opportunities in Ecology” list. “We are very grateful for this EDS support without which this project may not have gotten off the ground,” said Teresa.
EcologyPlus is currently supporting students in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area in its pilot phase. EcologyPlus plans on inviting other cities to be a part of the project, in the phase of the project.
To learn more about EcologyPlus, visit https://ecologyplus.esa.org/.