Southern Region and Communities | South Big Data Innovation Hub

SOUTHERN REGION & COMMUNITY OVERVIEW

The South Hub pursues community input to create positive impacts on people and their communities. The solicitation of community input has led to the development of inclusive programming, expansion of data science education, and society-improving projects.

IMPACT

150 virtual and in-person events that have attracted over 5,400 participants
200+ All hands Meeting attendees
6 South Hub supported multidisciplinary Spoke projects
6 seed grants provided by the S.E.E.D.S Program totally $250,000
Over $6 Million in multidisciplinary Spoke projects

VIEW MORE ABOUT OUR WORK WITH THE SOUTHERN REGION & COMMUNITY

The Internet-of-Things for Smart and Connected Cities and Campuses

South Hub Sponsors Materials and Advanced Manufacturing Workshop

On August 25, nearly sixty people gathered for a workshop on Data Infrastructure for Materials and Advanced Manufacturing.

Data4Kids: Virtually Teaching Kids about Data Science

This project was an awardee of the 2020 South Big Data Hub SEEDS Program - Southern Engagement and Enrichment in Data Science. It is one of two awards funded in the Seed Grant's mid-range category of >$50,000. The PIs seek to launch a website that contains guides, videos, and other content to assist educators and instructors on teaching data science to their students.

Evaluation and Demonstration of Open Data Portal Technology for Smart Cities and Data Science for Social Good

This project was an awardee of the 2020 South Big Data Hub SEEDS Program - Southern Engagement and Enrichment in Data Science. It is one of two awards funded in the Seed Grant's mid-range category of >$50,000. The proposed work will build on the Baltimore Data Science Corps NSF HDR project and will develop a number of use cases for serving open data for smart city and urban data applications..

Accelerating the Pace of Big Data

Just how Big is Big Data? It’s difficult to wrap our heads around it. We now carry in our pockets computers (a.k.a. smartphones) that have 1 million times more memory than NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer, which was used to land the first human beings on the moon. The world’s most powerful supercomputer is the Summit housed at the Oakridge National Laboratory. It can perform 200 quadrillion (1 x 1015) calculations per second.

Using a Virtual Ecological Research Assistant (VERA) to explain the impact of social distancing

COVID-19 continues to spread across the country and around the world. The current strategy for managing the spread of COVID-19 is social distancing, and a new white paper from Georgia Tech applies the use of an interactive Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to conceptualize the impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19.

The Keeping Data Science Broad Program

The series garnered community input into pathways for keeping data science as a discipline broadly inclusive. We gathered input from data science programs in any region across the nation, either traditional or alternative, and from a range of institution types including minority-serving institutions, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, tribal colleges, universities, and industry partners. The series consists of webinars, workshops, and programs exploring the future of data science education and workforce at institutions of higher learning that are primarily teaching-focused.

SPOKE Project Addresses COVID-19 with VERA

The NSF Spoke Project ‘Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge’ has repurposed VERA to model the effect of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19, including the SIR model of epidemiology. VERA enables a user to build conceptual models and agent-based simulations, and conduct “what if” virtual experiments.