Month: April 2022

Strathmore Data Week is a grassroots training initative that provides an avenue for Data Science training, exposure, and mentorship to Data Science students, professionals, and researchers. This year’s Data Week theme was on cultivating Data Science research in Africa. The event provided a platform for PhD students and early career researchers in Data Science to interact and exchange ideas. The week also provided a spotlight for women academics, experts, researchers, and leaders in Data Science to present their research, share ideas and map a way forward for building Data Science research in Africa.

The Data Week provided the participants access to accessible training on advancements in data analytics through the research showcase, research, and grant writing sessions. The participants also benefited from networking opportunities with guests working in Data Science and potentially establishing future collaborations more specifically with organisations such as One Acre Fund, Microsoft Africa Research Institute, Development Initiatives, and the ONS Data Science Campus. The project PI who was in charge of the planning and organisation of the Data Week directly benefited from the award through gaining leadership and management skills, planning and preparing training workshops, and mentoring interns and junior members of the Data Science team.

Key outcomes from the funding include:

Women in Data Science

Almost half (40%) of the participants were women, showing uptake of Data Science interest among women researchers. The week provided a spotlight for women researchers to showcase their work and was one of our more successful events of the week. Hence, provides more evidence for the need for more women data science forums, which will bring together the participants and their networks to build on the discussion from the panel event and provide more opportunities to further skills and research in data science.

Data Science Content

Data Week generated needed Data Science content, stemming from the recorded panels, workshops, and data science research showcase sessions. This content will augment the existing @iLabAfrica Data Science online training and promote participation in future training events. We also developed an Ask for Analytics, a free service to support Strathmore University post-doctorates, researchers and staff with their analytics questions and training needs.

Data Science Collaborations

Various organisations come together to make the week successful. This opportunity further developed more collaboration opportunities between the organisations and @iLabAfrica. More specifically, Development Initiatives is seeking to engage us in more capacity building around Data Science skills and democratising data for evidence-based decision making, One Acre fund is hoping to partner to look at how data analytics can track farm inputs to every individual small-scale farmer, ONS Data Science Campus is hoping to have more collaboration around capacity building at the university level through organising datathon competitions for social good. The week also strengthened the collaborative ties between Strathmore and the University of Bristol’s Jean Golding Institute through the planning of the JGI International Women’s Day event, that took place during the week. Through these partnerships, we hope to apply for funding to work on various partner-led projects and hence create a hub where a number of postdocs will work on the projects and have the JGI team visit and support face-to-face programs.

The JGI and Strathmore University will continue to work on developing ideas for project funding, we are especially interested in applying for funding to support our work on developing digital technologies to support small farm practices. We have jointly applied for the AEDIB|NET Project for African Digital Innovation Hubs where we propose the development of responsible artificial intelligence in agriculture and food systems in Africa. We also aim to explore potential avenues to progress impact projects arising from this collaboration such as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Agriculture and Food Systems (AFS) Innovation Research Network in Africa project.

The feedback for Strathmore Data Week was good!…

The ONS Data Science Campus who support the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics who participated and supported the panel session on the Safe and Effective Data Use were happy to collaborate and support more events building capacity specifically around the use of national statistics.

The One Acre Fund representative who showcased their work on using data analytics to support small holder farmers were happy to take part and meet researchers who are using data science to provide innovations around climate smart agriculture.

An opportunity to showcase data visualisations from your research.

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Competition Details

The Jean Golding Institute would like to invite staff and students at the University to submit their data visualisations for this exciting competition to find the best University of Bristol data visualisation.  You can see the entries from past competitions on our Flickr page. 

This year the prize for the winner includes the opportunity to present at the JGI Data Visualisation Interest Group and accept their prize at the Bristol Data and AI Showcase taking place at the M Shed in June. The overall winner will receive a £100 gift voucher and the two runners up will each receive £50 gift vouchers

Competition Rules

• The competition opens on 25 April 2022 
• The competition is open to all staff and students at the University of Bristol 
• Entries will need to be submitted by 23 May 2022 
• All entries should be original and not infringe any copywriting laws 
• Files can be sent in the form of PDF, PPT, JPEG, MP4. Email your entries to jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk. 
• Please append a short summary (one paragraph) of the project, study, paper, or dataset that the visualisation represents and the name and affiliation of the person/team submitting the entry 
• The Jean Golding Institute would like to disseminate any entries in print and on the web with authors names and affiliation so entry into this competition confirms you are happy for us to use your entry to publicise the research work at University of Bristol. 

Evaluation and Prizes

• The entries will be evaluated by a panel convened by the JGI 
• The overall winner will receive a £100 gift voucher and the two runners up will each receive £50 gift vouchers 
• The winner and runners up will have the opportunity to present at the JGI Data Visualisation Interest Group and accept their prize at the Bristol Data and AI Showcase taking place at the M Shed in June. 

Entry

Please submit your entry to jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk  

Timeline

Competition launch: 25 April 2022 

Deadline for entries: 23 May 2022 

Join us at the Bristol Data & AI Showcase on Tuesday 7 June 2022, for a chance to play with and find out more about visualising past and future climate change with a new 3D visualisation tool. Look back to your birth year, your parents’ birth years, or even as far back as the dinosaurs!

Hear from the creators, Sebastian Steinig, School of Geographical Sciences  (sebastian.steinig@bristol.ac.uk) and Tessa Alexander, Developer at the Research IT, in a short video about the project.

Sebastian notes that he hopes users will be able to “feel past and future climate change” to understand “how dynamic our Earth system was in the past”, but also to “see how alarming our current warming is in this context”.

Tessa notes that attendees of the Showcase may be interested in “moving the timeline back to when they were born” and “seeing how much the climate has changed within their own lifetime”.

Read more about the Climate Archive project blogpost and find out about previous JGI Seed Corn Funded Projects.

We plan to use the collaboration fund to support networks and public engagement events that will contribute to the aims of the Turing Institute and the University of Bristol, to utilise data science to change the world for the better.

Find out more about the funded projects:

Establishing a national vision for “Data-centric biological design”

This project will be led by Thomas Gorochowski (Bristol) and Diego Oyarzun (Edinburgh). The aim is to develop a white paper that will describe the vision for data-centric approaches that will transform Engineering Biology, which is one of the strategic priorities for UKRI. They plan to organise a workshop at Turing HQ, inviting leading figures in the field to work on the white paper. They will also create an application to become a Turing Special Interest Group to build longer term momentum.

Data competition with Ordnance Survey 

The JGI has developed this vehicle to develop links with external partners, providing, at the same time, an opportunity for early career researchers to be exposed to a variety of datasets and challenges. The JGI are in discussion with the Ordnance Survey, who are interested in being involved in the next data competition. They will provide an open dataset and a challenge, and the JGI will curate the dataset to make it fully accessible to those entering the data competition.

Bristol Science Film Festival (BSFF) competition and Data Week Live Event 

As part of Bristol Data Week 2022, and continuing our collaboration with BSFF, we will be hosting the JGI Data Science and AI Film Prize. The winners will be announced during Data Week (13-17 June), alongside a screening of their films. This year we plan to hold the event in person at The Watershed, inviting the JGI community to attend, including members of the general public, with an added social element. It’s important to us to continue supporting and celebrating this local festival and this arts and science collaboration.