The US National Data Service

* Free, public seminar — all welcome *
 

Abstract

This presentation will introduce participants to the US National Data Service (NDS) and how it is supporting research efforts, as well as integrating existing tools into a larger datanet ecosystem.

NDS was founded by a consortium of US-based research computing centres, governmental agencies, libraries, publishers and universities. NDS builds on the data archiving and sharing efforts already underway within scientific communities and links them together with a common set of services. NDS’s unique value-add is not in new tools but in making it easier to use such tools together through dependency management and increased interoperability between cyberinfrastructure services. NDS is a vision for how scientists and researchers across all disciplines can find, reuse, and publish data, while providing a workbench for research projects and a training platform for future curationists, data stewards, and scientists. 

The NDS has established relationships with the Midwest Big Data Hub (MWDH), the US Research Data Alliance (RDA), the Earth Sciences Information Partners (ESIP), and NSF’s Earthcube. These partnerships bring projects to the NDS, inform direction, and drive requirements. 

NDS works on a range of integration and data challenges, including the Materials Data Facility, Terra-Ref, and Big Data Innovations for Bridge Health.

The NDS Labs Workbench was used to support several events including a US Ignite hackathon, Hack Illinois, Data-driven Ag hackathon, Think Chicago’s hackathon, and courses at the University of Washington’s Information School.

NDS is a partner in the new Open Storage Network (weblink to become live soon), recently funded by the US National Science Foundation. 

Speaker bio's

Kenton McHenry, NCSA and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kenton McHenry is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, where he serves as Deputy Director for the Scientific Software and Applications division, and co-leads the Innovative Software and Data Analysis group (ISDA). He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the university's Department of Computer Science.

Kenton has applied his experience in computer vision, AI, and machine learning towards research and development in software cyberinfrastructure for digital preservation, auto-curation, and the providing of access to contents in large unstructured digital collections (e.g. image collections).

He serves as PI/Co-PI on a number of awards from a variety of agencies and organisations, ranging from NSF, NIH, NEH, and private sector partners.

He currently serves as the Project Director and PI of NSF CIF21 DIBBs - Brown Dog where his team works on means of making data agnostic to the file formats in which they are stored and providing general purpose easy-to-use tools to access uncurated collections by the automatic extraction of metadata and signatures from raw file contents.

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
 

Christine Kirkpatrick, National Data Service

Christine Kirkpatrick is the division director for Research Data Services (formerly IT Systems & Services) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. She is the Executive Director of the National Data Service (NDS), a US initiative focused on how scientists and researchers across all disciplines can find, reuse, and publish data. She is also Deputy Director and co-PI for the National Science Foundation-funded West Big Data Innovation Hub. 

Christine has been with the University of California for nearly 22 years, and previously headed UC San Diego’s Academic Computing unit, taught online for UCSD Extension’s Education department for 13 years, and was a founding member of the UCSD Teaching Online certificate. 

Prior to UC, she worked in industry for multiple software companies.

She holds a Masters from UC San Diego in Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering. 

Christine co-chaired the Women in Data Science & Engineering Workshop at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. She is a founding member of Ada’s Lunch Club, an outreach initiative designed to connect underserved undergrad and graduate populations with the (SD) Supercomputer Center.