SPARC Data Workshop & Hackathon

The deadline to register was Thursday, November 15, 2018.  If you missed the deadline and are interested in attending, please email: NIH-CF_SPARC@mail.nih.gov. 

This 2.5 day workshop is hosted by the NIH and the SPARC Data & Resource Center (DRC). The workshop will end at 12:30pm on December 7th. View the agenda. 

Why: Beginning in December, SPARC will begin enforcing the Material Sharing Policy, requiring investigators to share their data with the SPARC Consortium and later with the public. This meeting will teach you the workflow for submitting your files to the DRC, organizing your files into datasets, annotating your datasets with descriptive metadata, sharing your datasets with others, turning your datasets into maps, and much more!

What: The goal of the meeting is to teach SPARC investigators how to use the platforms being developed by the SPARC DRC: the Data Coordination Core (DAT-CORE), Map Synthesis Core (MAP-CORE), and Modeling & Simulation Core (SIM-CORE). The agenda will include:

• Presentations by the SPARC DRC teams about their capabilities and roadmap for the future
• Presentations by the SPARC Data Standards Committee and Data Sharing Committee
• Demonstrations of useful tools such as Docker, Jupyter, and GitHub
• A full-day hackathon competition, complete with  prizes  and  travel  awards  for the winners.  (Don’t worry if you don’t know how to code – there will be alternative activities for non-coders, where you can get hands-on experience using the DAT-, MAP-, and SIM-CORE platforms.)

Who should attend: Two people from each SPARC awardee team.  One of the attendees must be your data wrangler, the person on your team who is responsible for liaising with the SPARC DRC. The data wrangler should know your data well and should have basic knowledge of computer programming (preferably Python or MATLAB) and ideally some background in data science.

How to prepare: Each team should identify a dataset to bring to the meeting that was collected with support from your SPARC award. Please choose a dataset that you are comfortable sharing with others in the SPARC Consortium.  Total size of the dataset should be no larger than 1 GB.  Each attendee must also bring a laptop to the meeting.