IS&T RCS Guest Speakers - Research Software in Action

In this session, four researchers from different colleges/schools will talk about how they use specific research software in their work. Each talk will be approximately 20 minutes with up to 10 minutes for question-and-answer session after each talk. Titles and descriptions for the four talks appear below. Teaching an Undergraduate Urban Cultures Course Using GIS Story Maps Speaker: Sarah Frederick, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, Convener of Japanese Language Program, College of Arts and Sciences The presentation will show how the ArcGIS Online Story Maps and Journal tools are being used in a course on the history and artistic representation of Tokyo Japan. Students in the course learn basic skills in creating maps, using historical map layers, and creating a digital essay about a neighborhood of Tokyo for their final class projects. The purpose is to encourage student to conduct extensive research to build their maps, to think about how to display this information meaningfully, and engage deeply with an urban space that they may or may not have been able to visit in person. Using Data Dashboards to Communicate Environmental Exposures Speakers: Muskaan Khemani, Research Assistance, School of Public Health and Kevin Lane, Assistant Professor, School of Public Health ArcGIS Dashboards display geospatial data in a customizable and unique way to help make decisions, visualize trends, monitor status in real-time, and inform communities. Interactive maps and data dashboards can support communication efforts, for public health, environmental science, and more applications. Our team has developed multiple data dashboards to fulfill different stakeholder needs, from community organizations, policymakers, and news organizations. We will share some of our dashboards, and then walk you through how to make a basic dashboard. Geospatial processing at scale with Google Earth Engine Speaker: Paulo Arevalo, Research Scientist, Department of Earth and Environment, College of Arts and Sciences In this session you will learn the basics of Google Earth Engine (GEE). You will learn how GEE can be used for planetary-scale analysis and visualization of Earth science data. This will include a demonstration of an application built entirely on GEE to explore time series of satellite imagery, and an explanation on how we use such data to generate global maps of land cover and land cover change. The Dask Library for Parallel Computing Speaker: Brian Gregor, Lead Research Computing Applications & Data Analyst, Researching Computing Services, IS&T Dask is a an open-source Python library for parallel computing. It integrates easily with existing and popular libraries like Pandas, Xarray, and Numpy. Dask can scale code from laptops to large clusters. This library allows you to easily handle datasets that are too large to fit into your computer’s memory. This talk will introduce Dasks’s capabilities, how to migrate existing codes to use Dask, and resources to learn more about the library.