Waterhackweek 2020 Community Mixer – POSTPONED

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NOTICE: Waterhackweek 2020 has been rescheduled to August 31-September 4, 2020, because of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. As of April 9, 2020, all Waterhackweek 2020 programming has been moved entirely online, so the Community Mixer will not take place in its original format.

You’re Invited!

Join Waterhackweek participants, industry professionals and the greater University of Washington Freshwater Initiative and eScience Institute community for the Waterhackweek Community Mixer on Thursday, March 26, 2020, 4:00-6:30 pm at the Intellectual House. Waterhackweek, a 5-day collaborative workshop hosted by the UW Freshwater Initiative and eScience Institute, brings together water and data scientists from around the world.

Gregory R. Miller, Vice Dean of the UW College of Engineering, will give the welcome address!

Our keynote speaker is Lisa J. Graumlich! She will share her experiences translating research into impact as Dean of the UW College of the Environment.

The Community Mixer will also feature an informal poster session. All guests, including Waterhackweek participants and members of the local freshwater and data science communities, are invited to bring a physical or electronic representation of their work to inspire discussions and connections at the event. Community Mixer attendees are also invited to present a lightning talk about their work!

RSVP

Participants Reflect on First Waterhackweek

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FWI and the UW eScience institute hosted the first Waterhackweek, a five-day collaborative event for freshwater-related data science, March 25 – 29, 2019. We asked participants to give us their insight on the event — here are their thoughts.

Zahra Sharifnezhadazizi
Zahra Sharifnezhadazizi, City College of New York

Zahra Sharifnezhadazizi, PhD candidate, The City College of New York

I am pursuing a doctorate in environmental engineering at City College of New York (CCNY) where I am working on satellite remote sensing data analysis for environmental purposes. The main focus of my current research is remote sensing analysis of Land Surface Emissivity with high spatial and temporal resolution which makes me handling a huge volume of data using MATLAB. In order to be able to apply novel data analytics, I started to attend the CUAHSI Cyberseminar Series which introduced me to new horizons of data analysis with Python.

Honestly, I simply imagined that it would be one of those boring compact lectures in a few sessions. However, later events brought me a completely different view. At first, it motivated me to start a three-week online Python course. Then, I went on with the webinars and became familiar with all sets of new tools and websites such as Hydroshare workflow, Jupyter notebook, GitHub online version control, Google Earth Engine, and GeoPandas.

In the workshop week, we continued on those materials in detail and had a hands-on project. The final project was set up in a way that each person in each group, took part in their own personal interest and ability. There was no peer pressure of being obliged to do something for the sake of not just being left behind. Even the title of the projects was chosen by each group which made us start collaboration and negotiation from a smaller society.

The major interesting point for me was that the instructors were ranged from professors to students. In addition, the workshop had various types of participants, from undergrads to faculty members. Therefore, I thought I could also be an instructor if I have anything special to contribute.

Apart from that, the diverse milieu of the workshop in both terms of culture and science, and the welcoming nature of Seattle let me have this notion that organizers are not only proficient in technology, but also experts in social sciences. To my mind, Waterhackweek 2019 was an amalgamation of innovation, expression, learning, friendship, and joy, and I would be delighted to be part of this community once again.

Zhen Han
Zhen Han, Big Water Consultants

Zhen Han, Data Reporting and Analytics Manager, Big Water Consultants

I had a wonderful time at the Waterhackweek. Within five days, I was able to pick up a lot of new data science techniques and directly apply those skills through hands-on project work. The instructors and organizations clearly put a lot of thoughts on the structure of the events to strike a balance between learning sections and project time.

Although there are a lot of contents to learn and practice within a short period of time, the learning environment during the hack week was extremely friendly and low-stress. I appreciate that at the onset of the event, all participants were reminded to get prepared to feel a little bit at loss, stay open-hearted to seek help and help each out, and appreciate the diversity of the participants.

The weekly one-hour cyber-seminars were great lead-ins for the hack week. It was great that we could get an overview of the contents and start to implement the tools before the event started. The learning sessions during the week were also well-structured and greatly expanded my horizon on tools and techniques for data science and water research.

More importantly, it was great to get exposure to a variety of projects and work in a diverse team on a hands-on project. My teammates came from consulting firms, academia, government, and non-government organizations. Everyone brought their own experience into the discussion and problem-solving process. I felt extremely grateful for the opportunity to learn from our team leads and my teammates.

Katya Cherukumilli
Katya Cherukumilli, University of Washington

Katya Cherukumilli, postdoctoral researcher, University of Washington

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Engineering at the UW and the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called Global Water Labs. My research focus is on the design and deployment of low-cost technologies for drinking water treatment in resource-constrained regions. My expertise is in analytical aquatic chemistry, material characterization, groundwater geochemistry, field-relevant technology design, and social entrepreneurship.

I do not have formal training in data science or programming but was recently introduced to Python and R/ggplot. So when I first heard the announcement for proposing projects for Waterhackweek (WHW), I was a bit hesitant because I thought that I did not think I had the adequate data science skillset to participate. However, having completed my first WHW experience, I am so happy that I did. I would recommend the experience to anyone who has a general interest in learning more about how data science skills can be applied to their research.

I had the privilege of leading a team of data scientists to work towards a common goal: to build a “map app” that visualized multiple groundwater contaminants, with the added user-friendly features of observing trends over time and space (including depth). This experience gave me a brief insight into the vast power of numerous tools and software packages, including Hydroshare, GitHub, Tethys, Google Earth Engine, and GeoPandas. It also taught me about the concepts of workflow, database wrangling/cleaning, and version control. These concepts, although quite rudimentary to experienced data scientists, were novel to an experimentalist like me.

Learning these concepts taught me how to do very interdisciplinary and highly productive collaborative research in a short period of time. Overall, through this experience, I was introduced to a unique and powerful network of data scientists passionate about water issues. I was also encouraged (and supported) to push my own intellectual boundaries and to learn new methods that will greatly contribute to my future research and humanitarian work.

Freshwater Initiative, eScience Institute Host First Waterhackweek

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Waterhackweek 2019 participants at Portage Bay
Waterhackweek 2019 participants at Portage Bay (Robin Brooks / UW eScience Institute)

The UW Freshwater Initiative hosted the first Waterhackweek in partnership with the UW eScience Institute March 25 – 29, 2019 at the University of Washington (UW). At Waterhackweek, a five-day collaborative event for freshwater-related data science, water scientists from UW, other US and international universities, industry, and state departments learned about open-source technology, models, and data for conducting state-of-the-art research.

Waterhackweek participants at the opening reception
Waterhackweek participants at the opening reception (Yifan Cheng / UW Freshwater Initiative)

The hackweek model has emerged within the data science community as a powerful tool for fostering exchange of ideas in research and computation by providing training in modern data analysis workflows. In contrast to conventional academic conferences or workshops, hackweeks are intensive and interactive, facilitated by three core components: tutorials on state-of-the-art methodology, peer-learning, and on-site project work in a collaborative environment.This setup is particularly powerful for sciences that require not only domain-specific knowledge, but also effective computational workflows to foster rapid exchange of ideas and make discovery, as has been shown by the success of the previous eScience hackweeks. This is an excellent match with the nature of freshwater research where issues are sizeable and complicated and the community is diverse and synergistic.

Mornings consisted of interactive lectures, while afternoon sessions involved exploration of datasets and hands-on software development through project work in groups of four to eight people. During morning tutorial sessions, participants learned about state-of-the-art data science tools and workflows in interactive lectures covering techniques like accessing and formatting hydrometeorological datasets, leveraging community water data services, visualization, cloud computing, machine learning, Google Earth Engine, and practices for reproducible science.

Participants enjoy a Waterhackweek presentation
Participants enjoy a Waterhackweek presentation (Yifan Cheng / UW Freshwater Initiative)

On the first day of the event, interested participants were given the chance to pitch a project idea to the rest of the group. Their peers then decided which project they would like to “hack” on for the rest the week, and joined the project leaders to form project teams. Each afternoon, those small groups worked to define, clarify, and tackle different challenges in water sciences. The selected topics covered a broad spectrum of regions and subject matter, from the arid Southwest U.S. to tropical Hawaii and from Amazonian rivers to Alaskan lakes.

The teams used a diverse array of technologies to approach their chosen problems. One team explored the possibility of using a Raspberry Pi to collect and distribute water quality information during natural disasters. Another group used Google Earth Engine to model the complex dynamics of wildfire, vegetation change, surface water, and carbon release. Yet another team used Python data science and mapping libraries to visualize groundwater contaminants in California, while Conrad Koziol (Inlet Labs) and his team projected the future hydrology of the Pacific Northwest.

Explore the projects on GitHub

As part of the event, Waterhackweek participants, industry professionals, and members of the greater Freshwater Initiative and eScience Institute communities also attended Thursday evening’s Waterhackweek Community Mixer. Special guest speaker Sally Jewell, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama and former CEO of REI, discussed her experiences in understanding and managing water resources for the benefit of society. Waterhackweek 2019 participants also described their innovative new research in 90-second lightning talks and networked with experts in the freshwater and data science communities.

Special guest Sally Jewell speaking at the Waterhackweek Community Mixer
Special guest Sally Jewell speaking at the Waterhackweek Community Mixer (Yifan Cheng / UW Freshwater Initiative)

Thanks to our 2019 Waterhackweek organizers, including Nicoleta Cristea, Christina Bandaragoda, Anthony Arendt, Veronica Smith, Lillian McGill, Jacob Deppen, Owen Freed, Madhavi Srinivasan, and Rachael Murray.

The next Waterhackweek will take place March 23 – 27, 2020. Applications will open in August 2019 — stay tuned!