News/Blog | South Big Data Innovation Hub

The Hubbub

Keep up with the latest in South Big Data Innovation Hub news!

The Hubbub! Blog showcases Hub projects, new partnerships, working group activities, news, event highlights, and other activities around the Hub; we also include guest blog posts from Hub members around the region.

South Hub Sponsors Data Science for Social Good Summer Program 2017

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

PEPI-G Program 2020 | Applications Open March 1 - April 1
The Program to Empower Partnerships with Industry and Government (PEPI-G) supports data faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students from across the country in working on high level problems for the federal government. PEPI-G fellows will work with our 2020 partner, DHS-ARPA, using data science to fight human trafficking, discover best practices for IoT analytics that inform human decision making, or on other relevant projects Fellows may propose. Fellowships with DHS-ARPA will last 3, 4, 5, 6 months beginning either in the summer or the fall based on approval.

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!

Smart Privacy for Smart Cities: A Research Collaborative to Protect Privacy and Use Data Responsibly

The long-term vision of the project is to help municipal leaders strengthen their ability to collect, use, and share data in a responsible manner. This will help grow privacy-preserving innovations across applications and geographic boundaries for the public good. In this way, the Smart Privacy for Smart Cities Spoke will serve to increase public knowledge, understanding, and engagement with privacy-related concerns, and ultimately, to promote the public’s trust in smart city technologies and in their local government.

Integrating Biological Big Data Research into Student Training and Education

The project is a collaborative effort among the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Tuskegee University, Spelman College, and West Virginia University to integrate and automate biological big data into student training and education. The project will offer training workshops, engage faculty and students in developing a protocol to automate field data collection, and will prototype automated methods to enhance plant digitization.

Enhanced 3-D Mapping for Habitat, Biodiversity, and Flood Hazard Assessments of Coastal and Wetland Areas of the Southern US

The vision of this project is that communities occupying low-lying coastal areas of the southern US will be protected and develop in a sustainable manner through planning based on knowledge, conservation, and wise use of sensitive lands. Researchers from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science and the School of Geosciences at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, along with Google Earth Engine are collaborating with the South Big Data Hub through this project to develop more accurate, ultra-high resolution topographic, land cover, and urban environment geospatial products. The project examines in detail areas that were directly impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, and identifies flood-prone areas across the region.

The DataUp Program: Faculty Development in Data Science

The DataUp Program allows academic institutions to apply to bring data science training capabilities to their campuses, thus expanding data science to more academic campuses across the South.

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.

The PEPI-G Program: Fellowships with Industry and Government

The Program to Empower Partnerships between Industry & Government allows early career professionals to visit program participants to kick-start new collaborations and research through fellowships with data faculty members, research scientists, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (rising juniors and seniors).

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.