RENCI scientist set to join the ranks of Climate Reality Leaders

Published: September 27, 2017

As the Climate Reality Project website says: Ordinary people face challenges. Climate Reality Leaders embrace them.

RENCI’s Chris Lenhardt, an environmental data science and systems expert, will join the ranks of these leaders when he attends three days of training Oct. 17 – 19 to become part of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. The Leadership Corps is a global network of individuals committed to tackling the climate crisis and solving what is far and away the greatest challenge of our time. The Leadership Corps is part of the Climate Reality Project launched by former Vice President Al Gore to increase awareness about climate change and to support efforts at all levels aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Read more…

Tagged , , , |

Data Fellows project aims to make storm surge predictions faster and more accurate

Published: August 31, 2017

By Nelson Tull

Note: Nelson Tull is a graduate student in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. His faculty advisor, Casey Dietrich, is an NCDS Data Fellow conducting research to improve hurricane and storm surge guidance to emergency managers in North Carolina’s coastal counties. Dietrich’s Data Fellows research builds on previous work supported by the North Carolina Sea Grant program. Other collaborators are Rick Luettich, head of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, Brian Blanton, a senior research scientist and oceanographer at RENCI, and Jason Fleming of Seahorse Coastal Consulting. To learn more about this research, tune into the September 2017 NCDS DataBytes webinar.

When lives are on the line, minutes count but so does accuracy
Storm surge model forecasts are a critical tool used by coastal emergency managers to plan and make decisions. These models must be both accurate and fast to give reliable information in a timely manner as a storm moves toward the coast. The forecast guidance must also be visualized in a way that is meaningful to those who need this vital information. Read more…

NSF-funded undergraduate researchers get a taste of life at RENCI

Published: August 8, 2017

A panel of RENCI employees talks to NSF REU students during a recent visit.

On July 21, RENCI hosted 11 students and two professors from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. The program allows undergraduates to actively participate in research in any of the areas of research funded by the NSF. REU projects involve students in meaningful ways in ongoing research programs or in research projects specifically designed for the REU program. As a part of their REU experience at North Carolina A & T State University, a group of undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds and several universities came to RENCI for an educational tour.  Read more…

SAA award winning book has RENCI, UNC connections

Published: May 22, 2017

The Waldo Gifford Leland Award is presented annually by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) to an author or authors in recognition of “writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the field of archival history, theory, or practice.”

It’s an achievement worth bragging about, and this year, bragging rights belong to Philip C. Bantin, director of the archives and records management specialization at Indiana University, as well as to multiple chapter authors, including a team from RENCI, UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard University. Read more…

Tagged , , , |

25th GENI Conference looks towards the future of advanced networking

Published: May 10, 2017

The 25th GENI Engineering Conference hosted by Florida International University in March provided an excellent forum for over 100 participants from industry, academia and government to come together and discuss a variety of issues relevant to testbeds for at-scale experimentation in networking and distributed systems. Topics discussed included:

  1. Interoperability between GENI and other U.S. and international infrastructures;
  2. Enhancements and new directions for the GENI infrastructure in order to support future needs of the networking, distributed systems, and cloud computing communities and to attract research from other communities;
  3. Research and education activities currently underway on GENI; and
  4. GENI transition activities that are underway.

Read more…

Fourth annual Data Matters™ Short Court Series offers a wide range of topics for 2017

Published: April 26, 2017

Calling all researchers who manage, share, analyze and archive large or complicated data sets, business professionals struggling to stay afloat in the data deluge, data analysts looking to sharpen their skills, and students interested in the hot field of data science. The five-day Data Matters Short Course series is here to help and give you the knowledge you need to thrive in our data rich world.

Read more…

Tagged , , , |

Nature article looks at consortia as a key to kickstarting open science

Published: April 5, 2017

Note: RENCI has a successful track record in launching and sustaining consortia, including the iRODS Consortium and the National Consortium for Data Science. Now, a team of multidisciplinary, multi-institutional scientists has collected evidence showing consortia work as mechanisms that facilitate open science and data sharing. To read the full Nature article about the about their findings, click here.

Sharing research data, models and software to improve scientific reproducibility is becoming easier, however, changing the entrenched practices of the scientific community is a harder nut to crack.

In an article published March 30 in Nature, members of the Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative, including RENCI Senior Data Scientist Chris Lenhardt, point out that science, like most established institutions, finds change difficult to implement even when that change is positive. Open sharing of data and other resources, for example, can speed up the process of scientific discovery and enable discoveries to be more quickly translated into better products, treatments for diseases, and solutions to intractable problems.

Read more…

Tagged , , , |

Separating the wheat from the chaff in an age of bots and trolls

Published: March 24, 2017

In the age of ubiquitous connectivity and social media, information is at our fingertips. Unfortunately, so is misinformation and often it is hard to tell one from the other.

A recent roundtable discussion sponsored by the South Big Data Hub examined the rapidly changing landscape for building online communities, sharing information, and creating what often appears to be a groundswell of support for particular points of view. Read more…

Tagged |

First Southern Data Science Conference comes to Atlanta April 7

Published: January 27, 2017


Register now at www.southerndatascience.com

The data science community and members of the South Big Data Hub should mark their calendars for the very first Southern Data Science Conference, to be held on April 7 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta Perimeter at Villa Christina. The conference is expected to attract data science thought leaders from around the southeast and the nation and will feature speakers from innovative companies and research laboratories, such as Google, Microsoft, AT&T, NASA, Glassdoor and Groupon. Read more…

IBM exec offers tips for thriving in the digital data storm

Published: January 4, 2017

Cognitive thinking is the key to surviving and thriving in the perfect storm of modern technology, according to IBM’s Mac Devine, who presented a National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) DataBytes Webinar in December.

Devine, vice president and CTO of emerging technology and advanced innovation, IBM Cloud Division, said that our interconnected world composed of big data, the Internet of Things and the cloud, has created a tidal wave of data that is too large to handle using traditional methods of managing information. Cognitive thinking, or using high-level technology to comb through large sets of data with a human mindset, is one strategy for coping with what he termed a “perfect digital storm.”

Read more…