ESIP Lab Update: September 2018

Call for 2019 ESIP Community Fellows

The ESIP Lab is happy to announce the call for the 2019 class of ESIP Community Fellows. Community Fellows are graduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in bridging the gap between informatics and Earth science. This fellowship provides a chance to work closely with professionals in an interdisciplinary, cross-sector group on current Earth Science technology challenges.

Fellows serve a year-term starting from December 2018 – December 2019 and receive a $2000 stipend and paid travel to our Winter and Summer Meetings.

For more information, please visit here.

NumFOCUS Small Development Grant Ideas

The ESIP Lab is gathering ideas on development requests for NumFOCUS sponsored and affiliated projects as part of the fall solicitation for NumFOCUS Small Development Grants. ESIP recently joined the NumFOCUS Community Alliance to better bridge the two communities who share an interest in open, reproducible science.

NumFOCUS projects that propose to work on an ESIP community-submitted idea will then be eligible to receive up to $3K in additional funding for their proposal ($6k total). The call for NumFOCUS Small Development Grants will be released September 17, 2018.

Read more here. 

P.S. NumFOCUS is having their project forumn at the end of September in NYC. If you register with this link, you get 20% off.

Lab Funded Project Highlight: Geoweaver

Geoweaver is a web system to allow users to easily compose and execute full-stack Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) workflows in web browsers by taking advantage of the online spatial data facilities, high-performance computation platforms, and open-source deep learning libraries.

One month into their 2018 ESIP Lab award, the team has completed the following deliverables: 

• Kick off announcement in CSISS
• Development environment discussion 
• Deep learning library selection (Keras/DL4j+Tensorflow)
• Cloud instances started
• High performance computing library (Spark) is installed on the instance VMs
• Web wrapper is developed to invoke Spark and DL4j via the Web

Great work Geoweaver team! Check out their Github repo and full proposal here.

Challenge Highlight: The NSF 2026 Idea Machine

The NSF 2026 Idea Machine is a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science and engineering. Participants can earn prizes and receive public recognition by suggesting the pressing research questions that need to be answered in the coming decade, the next set of “Big Ideas” for future investment by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's an opportunity for researchers, the public and other interested stakeholders to contribute to NSF's mission to support basic research and enable new discoveries that drive the U.S. economy, enhance national security and advance knowledge to sustain the country's global leadership in science and engineering.

Learn how to participate here.