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.