Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Pilot: A Cybertraining Program to Advance Data Acquisition, Processing, and Machine Learning-based Modeling in Marine Science

Marine science researchers have access to a variety of cyberinfrastructure (CI), including software applications, facilities to host large datasets and provide computational power, and scientific tools that enable them to explore and predict the ever-changing ocean. However, the use existing CI resources are often not intuitive for new researchers. Furthermore, early-career marine science researchers have limited experience with advanced computing and data engineering techniques, which makes adoption of advanced research CI resources difficult. This project will carry out two summer training programs to educate and train early career researchers in marine science to promote CI awareness and related technical skills development to facilitate and support their research. The project team includes oceanographers and machine learning scientists. This project will create a publicly available training material repository on core CI skills for marine science researchers and provide two summer training programs in 2023 and 2024. The training will introduce the design principles of a data workflow for research projects on CI. To support researchers in the workflow-building process, this project will create a drag-and-drop tool that helps researchers generate scripts for common data workflow components such as data acquisition, data processing, and data visualization. The scripts generated can be added as components of a data workflow system and then deployed to advanced CI platforms. This project will train early-career researchers in marine science to integrate and use CI in their research through hands-on projects and hackathons to solve open-ended research questions. The training programs will be broadly disseminated through various outreach programs to encourage participation from researchers at community colleges and minority-serving institutions that have marine science or related programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.