RCS18

Christie is an Assistant Professor at Kent State University and head of the Bahlai Lab. She is an applied quantitative ecologist and population ecologist who uses approaches from data science to help solve problems in conservation, sustainability, and ecosystem management. She combines a background in physics and organismal ecology with influences from the tech sector and conservation NGOs to ask questions and build tools addressing problems in population ecology.

Christie is a strong advocate of open science and has taught workshops and classes on open data management and data analysis, such as this amazing workshop, for pushing higher reproducibility standards in science. During this summer school, she will lead a workshop exploring the reproducibility of papers prepared using open science methods and talk about some of the philosophies and motivations for these approaches.

Bastian is a biologist-turned-bioinformatician. In 2011 he co-founded openSNP, an open data repository that allows individuals to donate their personal genomes into the public domain. Since then over 4,100 datasets have been donated through openSNP, making it the worlds largest database of its kind. After he finished his PhD in Bioinformatics he joined the Open Humans Foundation. As its Director of Research, Bastian facilitates participatory research projects and empowers individuals to take control over sharing their personal data. In addition to this Bastian also mentors the next generation of Open Leaders with Mozilla and serves on the Board of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

While our algorithms become more and more powerful they also become hungrier and hungrier - for data. The large-scale success of machine learning these days is thus not only a function of better algorithms and open source software packages, but also of ever-growing training data sets. It is for this reason that reproducibility not only depends on good software engineering practices, but also on open data. Bastian will share his experiences in making data open and maintaining it.

Luc Henry spent around ten years exploring science in various ways and places in Europe. In 2015, he was the Managing Editor of European science magazine Technologist. He then worked at the Swiss National Science Foundation before taking his actual position as an advisor to the President of EPFL. Luc holds a PhD in chemical biology from the University of Oxford.

Luc is interested in all aspects of open science since his early days as a researcher. In his presentation, he will give an overview of how science is changing, and why the transparency and reproducibility of research results are embedded in a broader movement to make knowledge more accessible and useful.

Wenzel is an assistant professor leading the Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences. His research mostly revolves around light transport simulations and material appearance models. The overarching goal of this work is to improve the accuracy and fidelity of light transport simulations in computer graphics, and to make the underlying models accurate and fast enough for predictive design and manufacturing applications.

Wenzel will introduce us to the software development workflow used by his group, which enforces maintainable and reproducible development practices without losing the agility that is needed to make progress on a challenging research problem. He will step through all parts of the stack including Jupyter notebooks, C++14, pybind11, continuous integration and Git submodules in a hands-on manner. He will also share his experiences in creating projects that ultimately became relatively widely used and some of the positive and unexpected fallout that this has created.

Anna is a Research Software Engineer at the University of Sheffield, helping researchers do more with their code and data. With a background in computational ecology, Anna is interested in open source methodological innovation in science, and community and capacity around modern open science tools and practices. She is a member of vibrant open science communities such as the Mozilla Open Leaders network, as a member of the inaugural cohort and mentor on subsequent training rounds, rOpenSci and a co-organizer of the Sheffield R users group.

During the summer school, Anna will teach principles and best practice for conducting reproducible science, focusing on data and workflow management.

Filip is a software engineer at Google Zürich working on video analysis at YouTube. His most recent work is oriented around developing machine learning models and integrating them into complex systems. Before that he did two internships at Facebook, where he worked on spam detection and infrastructure, and a research internship at EPFL.

Filip will describe the experience and difficulties of applying research from an engineering viewpoint. Additionally, he will talk about the day-to-day software development process, covering practices in coding style, code review and testing.

Ana and Malin are responsible for data management planning and teaching at the Digital Curation Office, ETH Library, ETH Zurich. Before joining the library, they both worked in research and received their PhD in Climate Sciences - Ana from the ETH Zurich and Malin from the University of Bern. During their research career, they were confronted with the daily challenges of data management in modelling (Ana) and experimental (Malin) research. This experience highly motivated them to engage in training researchers at any career stage on data management and data management planning.

Ana and Malin will interactively introduce what data management essentially is and why it concerns all of us. As the research data lifecycle is probably going to outlive a researcher's project at a particular institution, a data management plan is a stringent necessity which describes measures for active research data management, data sharing as well as the long-term preservation of research data for a potential re-use of data in the future.