The Unidata Users Committee is seeking nominations for a Graduate Student representative to join the group of university faculty members who serve on this committee. Nominees should be Graduate Students who use Unidata software, hold a strong interest in the Unidata program, and have an interest in learning how a community-based program like Unidata is governed. Nominations may be made by any community member, and self-nominations are acceptable. This position will be for a two-year term beginning with the fall 2021 Users Committee meeting.

Russ DeSouza with students

Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.

The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies.

Unidata Users and Strategic Advisory Committees

Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps Unidata stay on top of trends in education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefitted tremendously from committee advice and involvement.

Mike Zuranski

Mike Zuranski of the College of DuPage has been awarded the 2020 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

Zuranski has been contributing to the well-known NexLab site as a student at the College of DuPage in 2011, and has been a Meteorology Support Analyst for the program since 2016.

Unidata is looking for an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) developer to join our team, helping educators and students learn how to use Unidata software and data services to support their scientific research.

In this role, you'll interact with Unidata's community of researchers and educators to determine how they are harnessing AI/ML approaches to data analysis, and work toward a convention for storing data and metadata in an AI/ML ready way. In addition, you'll help evaluate existing tools such as the MetPy and Siphon python libraries and the netCDF libraries for fitness in the context of AI/ML applications. Your work will help identify and implement improvements that allow for smoother integration of Unidata software into a modern AI/ML pipeline.