2023 Users Workshop

2023 Unidata Users Workshop

Storytelling with Earth System Science Data:
Challenges and Opportunities for Effective, Ethical, and Reproducible Science

5-8 June 2023
Boulder, Colorado

The Unidata Users Committee invites you to join Unidata staff, community members, and guests for a community workshop to take place in 5-8 June 2023 as a hybrid (in-person and/or virtual) event hosted in Boulder, Colorado.

Workshop Themes

The workshop organizing committee has outlined the following day-by-day workshop themes, along with some expected outcomes from each day's activities.

Day 1 Theme: Grand challenges and storytelling

Communicating the knowledge and insight we derive from our data is an important part of the scientific process. In this session, we invite speakers to share examples of effective storytelling that can help us communicate our results to others through data, words, and images.

Topics: Tools for exploratory data analysis, approaching data access and accessibility challenges.

Outcomes: How to navigate, open, process, and articulate data using a variety of methods.

Day 2 Theme: Multidisciplinary Data

Addressing issues of importance to society requires a variety of data sources. Whether the data come from models, observations, or surveys, their strengths and weaknesses must be fully understood before they are integrated into workflows. In this section, we invite experts to "tell their story" about successes and challenges associated with using multidisciplinary data to address relevant and impactful research questions.

Topics: Scientific storytelling, working with multi-domain or cross-disciplinary data.

Outcomes: Find, read, calculate, and visualize disciplinary and related datasets to tell a compelling story.

Day 3 Theme: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Ethical Data Solutions Relevant to Society (When, Why, How, and Implications)

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) has transformed how public and private sector professionals turn data into knowledge. The unprecedented availability and accessibility of AI/ML tools and techniques can be both empowering and overwhelming. In this section, we invite speakers to discuss foundational AI/ML topics, use cases, and how to approach building ethical and trustworthy solutions relevant to society.

Topics: AI/ML foundations (why and when?), data ethics, working with private-sector data.

Outcomes: Demonstrate ethical and responsible practices for telling the story of data; Determine when AI/ML techniques are an appropriate solution and demonstrate AI/ML approaches for a variety of scenarios.

Day 4 Theme: Open, Reproducible Science

Research data and methods are most effective and impactful when they are accessible by anyone. While there has been incredible progress in this area as of late, there are still significant obstacles that impede equitable access to research output and techniques. In the spirit of the "Year of Open Science", we invite speakers to discuss their own open science successes and challenges, and to spur a robust discussion on how best to make progress in this area.

Topics: open data best practices, contributing to open data and open science, data quality.

Outcomes: Develop tools to enable individuals to participate in open science to facilitate research and education in the geosciences.

Location

The 2023 Users Workshop will be held on the campus of the University of Colorado, in Boulder, CO. For additional information on the location see the Travel and Lodging Information page.

Remote attendees can expect to be fully included in all workshop sessions and activities. All sessions will have both in-person and virtual dedicated moderators to facilitate discussion, answer questions, and support technology needs. The workshop will use Zoom to facilitate all sessions. To ensure the best remote experience, make sure you have the latest version downloaded on your computer.

Questions?

If you have questions about the 2023 Users Workshop, please contact Tanya Vance at the Unidata Program Center.

Workshop Sessions, Videos, and Materials

All times are Mountain Daylight Time (UTC−06:00).