Students and Education | South Big Data Innovation Hub

STUDENTS AND EDUCATION OVERVIEW

The South Big Data Hub has provided students opportunities to gain real-world experience through attending multi-week team building fellowships, collaborating in fast-paced atmospheres, providing expert knowledge to address company data-related business challenges, obtaining internships to utilize data for social impact, and participating in speaking engagements and travel awards to expand their knowledge and network.

In addition, the South Hub and partners developed tools to help youth understand the many aspects of the data-intensive computing environment through a national online Data Science course.

IMPACT

176 students participated in DataUp workshops
100+ indirect learners who benefited from workshops/bootcamps, modules, and courses taught by DataUp trained faculty members
Over $280,000 in funding for students to gain real-world data-related career experience

VIEW MORE ABOUT OUR WORK WITH STUDENTS AND EDUCATION

2020 PEPI-G: Program to Empower Partnership with Industry and Government

The Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government (PEPI-G) supports data faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (rising juniors and seniors) from across the country in working on high level problems for the federal government. The overarching goals of the program are three-fold to (1) support academics in developing relationships with industry and government for research collaboration and career success; (2) increase the capacity of students to enter the workforce landscape in data science, computing, and Big Data; (3) provide real-world impact through hands-on experience in data science.

Education and Workforce Working Group

An open quarterly professional working group for data science educators and program leaders to discuss education and training in data science, curriculum development, training collaborations, and workforce development.

Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge

This project brings together scientists from a dozen institutions in academia, government, and industry to translate big data into meaningful knowledge that supports research and education in environmental sustainability. The project will focus on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the world’s largest database of biological species, and other biodiversity data sources. This project 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. We believe that this interactivity should be a significant boon for learning and education.

Smart Grids Big Data

This project aims to increase our understanding of the merged data collected from physical systems in order to better understand how energy flows through grids, how to prevent emergencies such as blackouts and brownouts, and how to improve asset management and increase energy efficiency.

DataUp Workshop - University Puerto Rico—Rio Piedras: Students Buzz with Excitement for Data Science

The South Hub created the DataUp program to enable researchers and educators to teach data science students and prepare them for future data-intensive and data-enabled environments. On August 18, 35 learners packed the room, at the University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras (UPRRP), to participate in a hands-on workshop focused on data management and analysis for genomics research. Students learned best practices for the organization of bioinformatics projects and data, use of command line utilities, use of command line tools to analyze sequence quality and perform variant calling, and connecting to and using cloud computing. This workshop, taught in English and Spanish, created such a buzz that a waitlist was created. The waitlist included 13 individuals!

PyData Carolinas offers tools and tips for bioinformatics research

PyData Carolinas 2016 brought together hundreds of professionals, researchers and students interested in data analysis to discuss how best to apply Python tools to meet challenges in data management, processing, analytics and visualization. Among the attendees was Clarence White, one of two students from North Carolina A & T who was sponsored by the South Big Data Hub to attend. The Hub was also a silver sponsor of PyData Carolinas. Read to learn more about the conference form a participant's point of view.

iCompBio REU and Workshop Provides Training to Students and Faculty

In the week of July 29-Aug 2, 2019, more than 50 faculty and students from more 21 institutions participated in two R bootcamps at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC). The iCompBio REU is supported by NSF Award 1852042, REU Site: ICompBio – Engaging Undergraduates in Interdisciplinary Computing for Biological Research. The first bootcamp on data wrangling using R was taught by Hong Qin, a computational biologist at UTC. Materials for this R Data Wrangling bootcamp is available at a public GitHub repository https://tinyurl.com/UTC-R-camps2019. The second bootcamp, Electronic Health Records, was taught by Elvena Fong and Zhuqi Miao from the Center for Health Systems Innovation at the Oklahoma State University.

PEPI Builds Bridges Between Industry and Researchers

The South Big Data Hub’s Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry (PEPI) pairs early-career faculty and researchers throughout the South with Industry Partners and support their travel to make collaboration possible.

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

Hackathon part of effort to make Orlando the ‘Smartest City’

On August 26 and 27, programmers and software engineers convened in Orlando to push the boundaries of creativity, innovation, reality, and technology to build solutions and concepts that have the potential to make a difference in the Orlando community. Called the Orlando Smart Cities Hackathon, the event aimed to support the city of Orlando in its efforts to become a smart city and also to demonstrate the city’s capabilities as it works to earn the title of “The Smartest City.” Orlando received two smart cities grant awards and is pursuing a variety of additional funding opportunities for smart cities initiatives that would help to enhance transportation citywide and beyond. In these pursuits, the city continues to move forward with building a data-driven infrastructure that will support safer, cleaner, and more efficient travel and an improved quality of life.