KISTE project workshop: “Open Source solutions for Earth system data (R, OSGeo, Python)”
OpenGeoHub’s Summer School 2022 took place from August 28th – September 3rd virtually in person(!). As in the previous events, several experts from various disciplines around open source software and open data were invited to provide lectures for researchers who would like to improve their analysis and modeling skills. In total, 17 lecturers came to teach 40 participants. 52°North co-organized the event as part of the KI:STE project and contributed to the lecturers’ lineup with Benedikt Gräler, Christian Autermann, and Markus Konkol. During the reception on Sunday, some of the lecturers and participants had their first opportunity to get in touch. This was followed by five days of Earth System Analysis training sessions and discussions with a focus on R, Python, and Julia.
During day 1, the participants received a general overview of the program, as well as, an introduction to the hackathon on global pastures mapping. They also had the chance to identify (work-related) synergies while research speed dating! Markus’ talk on reproducibility kicked off day 2. Christian was also on stage talking about “GeoNode as Research Data Infrastructure”. We ended the day with a reproducibility hackathon, which we summarized in a little blog post. On day 3, Ben presented an “Extreme events session” and Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma provided some updates on the R packages sf, sftime, and stars in a tutorial. The sessions on Thursday focused on Machine Learning. Check out, for example, the very well-received talks by Hanna Meyer on “ML in R: how to deal with extrapolation and overfitting problems” and Ribana Roscher on “Explainable ML” (all slides and videos are linked below). The day ended with a fantastic social event in a traditional German restaurant. During the last working day, participants were given the chance to present their hackathon results. Congratulations to the winner, Francisco Zambrano. Last but not least, OpenGeoHub awarded Markus Neteler from Mundialis the ‘Life Achievement Award 2022’ for his “continuous, generous and marvelous contributions to the Open Source community, for enabling a generation of young researchers, and for his fearless and enormous heart”. Congratulations! 52°North organized an excursion to conclude the week, giving participants and lecturers a final chance to discuss open questions and to connect for future joint activities.
Thanks to all lecturers and participants that formed this engaging week of scientific exchange.