From the DataLab
Newsletter Archives
DataLab News
Celebrating Womxn in Tech Speaker Series
To honor and celebrate Women’s History Month the UC Womxn in Tech committee is hosting a virtual series with amazing speakers on the days leading up to International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8, 2024. This programming aims to foster a sense of belonging, relevance, and empowerment. Registration is required; these events are open to […]
Apply for the Lang Prize 2024!
GET RECOGNIZED FOR YOUR WORK ON AN DATA-INTENSIVE AND DATA SCIENCE PROJECTS The UC Davis Library’s Lang Prize for undergraduate information research — which offers awards up to $2,000 — is now accepting applications for 2024. Undergraduates who have worked with a DataLab or another other library expert on a research project using data science are invited […]
Join the UC-Wide Coastal Resilience Open Data Science Challenge
Calling all data scientists, coastal resilience researchers, and students! The University of California Disaster Resilience Network has launched an Open Science Data Challenge on Coastal Resilience, sponsored by EY (Ernst & Young Global Limited). Nearly 75% of the world’s population lives within 50 kilometers of the ocean. While these coastal zones host critical ecosystems, infrastructure, and […]
Winter 2024 Events
WORKSHOPS Unless otherwise specified, all workshops are in DataLab’s classroom (Shields Library room 360) with Zoom broadcast. Advance registration is required. OFFICE HOURS RESEARCH AND LEARNING CLUSTERS Meetings are in Shields Library room 360 unless otherwise specified. Signup for individual RLC listservs for more information. FacebookTweetLinkedIn
UC Love Data Week 2024
UC Love Data Week returns this February for its fourth year. During this 5-day event DataLab and partners from across the University of California system offer workshops, talks and demonstrations focusing on skills and tools for working with data. Check out the full UC LDW 2024 schedule and register now! UC Davis’ workshops during UC Love […]
We’re Hiring a Research Data Scientist
DataLab is seeking a full-time Research Data Scientist to join our team! As a Research Data Scientist at DataLab, you will support academic research at all levels across the university through collaborating on cutting-edge research projects, providing data science consultations, and offering training workshops. You’ll develop infrastructure, open source software, methods, and tools for our […]
Fall 2023 Events Overview
Workshops Workshops are Thursdays in Shields Library room 360 (broadcast on Zoom) @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm unless otherwise specified. Registration required. Office Hours Research and Learning Clusters Meetings are in Shields Library room 360 unless otherwise specified. Signup for individual RLC listservs for more information. FacebookTweetLinkedIn
Apply for $1K Graduate Student Prize
The 2023-2024 UC Davis Library Graduate Student Prize is now open for applications. This prize is co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library and Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement to recognize graduate student and postdoctoral researchers who use the Library* to create outstanding, publicly engaged scholarship. Apply by December 1, 2023. *Engagement with the UC Davis […]
Roundup of Global Annual Events and Opportunities for 2023-2024
With a return to some normalcy also comes a return to more frequent events and opportunities, and the global data science community has a number of upcoming events, conferences, fellowships, and hackathons to look out for in 2023-2024. See below for a non-exhaustive list of annual or biannual events and opportunities compiled by DataLab staff […]
APPLY FOR 2024 START-UP RESEARCH COLLABORATION AWARD
DataLab is accepting applications from UC Davis faculty and professional researchers for 2024 Start-Up Research Collaborations. These exploratory, or early phase, research collaborations pair domain area researchers with DataLab’s data scientists to gather data and/or perform preliminary exploration and hypothesis testing to make rapid progress on a data-driven domain research problem. We will begin reviewing proposals […]
Apply for Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives
DataLab is seeking a full-time Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives. This is a business development position. As Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives, you will be responsible for establishing and managing relationships between DataLab and campus external entities, such as commercial entities, National Laboratories, and government and funding agencies. This will include developing, establishing, and maintaining collaborative […]
Data Analysis Collaboratory 2-Week Summer Workshop
This two-week hands-on workshop is for researchers with already functioning data analysis projects who want to “level up” their project to take advantage of bigger resources (High Performance Computing and/or the cloud), use more automation, improve their reproducibility, expand their output formats and visualizations, conduct parameter sweeps, add more data sets, and/or otherwise work to […]
DataLab Faculty Publishes New Book
We are delighted to congratulate Professor A. Colin Cameron, Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC Davis and member of DataLab’s Faculty Advisory Group, on the publication of his new book, Microeconometrics using Stata: Second Edition. Co-authored with Pravin K. Trivedi of Indiana University, Bloomington, this two volume book covers over ten years of enhancements to […]
DataLab Debuts AR and VR Exhibits at Picnic Day 109
Experience Augmented and Virtual Reality at UC Davis’s Picnic Day 109! When: Saturday, April 15th from 11am-2pmWhere: Shields Library lobbyWho: Open to the public Come explore how we develop and use Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) for research and teaching at UC Davis. Make mountains in our AR Sandbox and see what happens […]
UC Love Data Week 2023
UC Love Data Week returned this past February for its third year. DataLab partnered with 14 groups from across the University of California system to offer a series of workshops, talks and meetups focusing on skills and tools for working with data. Over the course of the week, over 2098 registrants participated in 26 activities, […]
Calling All Future Scientists!
Take Our Children to Work Day Open House at DataLab! When: Thursday, April 27, 9-11amWhere: DataLab, Shields Library 360Who: UC Davis-Affiliated Families Future scientists! Come explore how we develop and use Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) for research and teaching. Make mountains in our AR Sandbox and see what happens when it rains […]
Course Announcement: NLP and Large Language Models for Health and Medicine
DataLab Faculty Director Professor Vladimir Filkov and affiliate Professor Nick Anderson are teaching a new seminar course this spring: ECS 289G: Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models for Health and Medicine. Course Information:CRN: 63185Lectures: Friday, 11 – 12:30 pm, starting April 7.Location: DataLab classroom, 3rd Floor of Shields Library, Room 360 (lecture room), UC Davis Campus Course […]
Join DataLab’s Challenge at HackDavis (May 20-21)
DataLab is pleased to sponsor the Open Data Hack for Social Good as part of HackDavis 2023, a 24-hour collegiate hackathon dedicated to empowering student hackers to collaborate and build impactful projects that make the world a better place. This year’s hackathon will take place in-person at the University Credit Union Center in Davis on […]
WOMEN IN DATA SCIENCE 2023 DATATHON AND CONFERENCE
The annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference returns in March! See below for how to get involved in this worldwide event. SAVE THE DATE WiDS Datathon runs January 4 through March 1, 2023 WiDS Datathon Davis orientation session February 15, 2023 WiDS Stanford 2023 Conference on March 8, 2023 (in person at Stanford University) […]
UC Love Data Week 2023
The UC Davis DataLab, along with data organizations from across the UC system, is hosting UC Love Data Week 2023! Join us February 13-17 for a week of training workshops and presentations covering many facets of working with data. With over 20 presentations and workshops, whether you’re working on qualitative or quantitative data, there’s plenty to choose from. […]
CA 2022 Election Data Challenge Public Symposium
Register now and join us for our Challenge Finale Symposium on November 7th from 5-7pm! Registration is free and open to the public. The California 2022 Election Data Challenge is a month-long data science + civic engagement competition designed to leverage public data to help us understand this year’s ballot initiatives! During the month of October, Participant […]
DataLab Launches New Micro-Credential with GradPathways
To help our research community discover and grow their data science skills and gain a competitive edge in today’s data-driven workplace, DataLab has launched the Text Mining and Natural Language Processing pathway as part of the UC Davis GradPathways Institute for Professional Development’s micro-credential initiative. This program enables UC Davis graduate students and postdoctoral scholars […]
Winter-Spring 2024 Courses: Adventures in Data Science
Adventures in Data Science is back in 2024! DataLab directors Drs. Carl Stahmer and Pamela Reynolds, with engagement from the entire DataLab team, teach a two-part series in Winter and Spring quarters that offers a hands-on introduction to data science. This year the series is listed as STS 115: Data Sense & Exploration: Critical Storytelling […]
Call for 2022-2023 DataLab Affiliates
UC Davis DataLab is a cross-university effort that supports data science research and training. Our Affiliates program has been quiet during the past two years of the pandemic as our community’s needs were understandably elsewhere, and now we’re excited to reboot the program! Our goal for the Affiliates program is to support graduate students, postdoctoral […]
New RLC: the Davis Julia Users Group
DataLab is pleased to announce a new Research and Learning Cluster for Fall 2022: the Julia Users Group! This group is a study group about learning to program in Julia, with specific focus on applications to data science and scientific computing. Community members from all disciplines and at all levels of experience are welcome! Prior […]
Upcoming Intro Workshops: Python & R
DataLab is offering two free workshop series this September and we invite you to apply! Introduction to Python is a 3-workshop series taking place September 6, 7, and 8 from 5-7 pm, and Introduction to Collaborative and Reproducible Research Practices with R is a 4-workshop series taking place September 12, 13, 14 and 15 from […]
Call for Applications – Translational Health Data Science Fellowship Program 2022-2023
UC Davis graduate students engaging in applied health data science research are encouraged to apply for a 9-month fellowship program supported by CITRIS, CTSC, and Department of Public Health Sciences in collaboration with DataLab.
WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ARE A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT
In keeping with our mission to support high-impact, quality, data-driven research, DataLab offers its expertise in data science and informatics to researchers, departments, and organizations that support a woman’s right to choose. For advice or assistance in conducting data-enabled research that supports women’s reproductive rights, please contact us at datalab@ucdavis.edu to begin a discussion on […]
Disease Bioportal Project Awarded Phase II NSF Grant
We are pleased to congratulate DataLab affiliate Dr. Beatriz Martinez (Vet Medicine) on securing funding for Phase II of the Disease BioPortal dashboard project. DataLab Director of Translational Data Science Dr. Vladimir Filikov (Computer Science) is senior personnel on the grant. The Disease BioPortal dashboard provides data to researchers, veterinarians, and farmers interested in tracking […]
Recordings now available from 2022 UC Love Data Week
In February UC Davis DataLab joined forces with 10 data organizations from across the UC system to offer the second annual UC Love Data Week 2022. During this week the UCs hosted 31 presentations and workshops with over 2,500 registrants. These training activities covered all things data – from access, management, and organization to ethics, […]
MPA Project Receives New Funding
We are pleased to congratulate DataLab affiliates Drs. Ryan Meyer and M.V. Eitzel from the UC Davis Center for Community and Citizen Science on securing supplemental funds to extend their interdisciplinary project “Analyzing use of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) from a citizen and community science dataset.” DataLab’s data scientists Drs. Nick Ulle and Pamela Reynolds […]
Announcing 2022 Translational Health Data Science Fellows
We are excited to announce the 2022 cohort for the inaugural Translational Health Data Science fellowship program!
Women in Data Science 2022 Datathon and Conference
In Winter quarter 2022 DataLab will be hosting events as part of the annual Women in Data Science Datathon and global Conference.
UC Love Data Week 2022
The UC Davis DataLab along with data organizations from across the UC system is hosting UC Love Data Week 2022!
DataLab hiring 3 undergraduate students to start winter 2022 [Applications Closed]
We are hiring for student analyst position (aka operational analytics and communications) and two open student assistants! Invite your students to apply!
Now Accepting GSR Applications for Winter 2022! [Applications closed]
The DataLab is looking for two new Graduate Student Researchers for Winter quarter 2022!
Translational Health Data Science Fellowship
UC Davis graduate students engaging in applied health data science research are encouraged to apply for a 9 month fellowship program supported by CITRIS, CTSC, and Department of Public Health Sciences in collaboration with DataLab.
DataLab launches first micro-credential pathway on research computing
To help our research community discover and grow their data science skills and gain a competitive edge in today's data-driven workplace, DataLab has launched a Research Computing pathway as part of the UC Davis GradPathways Institute's new micro-credential initiative.
Leveraging AI to Fight COVID: DataLab Partners with UC Davis Medical Center to Predict COVID-19 Hospital Admissions
The UC Davis DataLab has partnered with UC Davis Health to develop improved machine learning and AI models for predicting COVID-19 admissions and overnight stays, and to put them into use by doctors and nurses working with COVID patients.
Adventures in Data Science: Teaching the Data Science Skills that Students in Every Major Need
The UC Davis DataLab developed a two-quarter experiential education curriculum to expose non-majors to data science tools and computational thinking, and grow a more inclusive community of data science learners.
Unlocking Insights from Public Data: A case study with COVID-19 exposure data
The UC Davis DataLab used a locally significant dataset, AB 685 COVID-19 exposure data, to illustrate how data science workflows and tools can be combined to turn publicly available tabular data into an impactful dynamic and interactive data visualizations.
Call for 2022 Start-up Research Project Collaborations
UC Davis DataLab: Data Science and Informatics is accepting applications from UC Davis faculty and professional researchers for Start-Up Project Collaborations for the 2021-2022 academic year.
DataLab announces new immersive visualization facility
The UC Davis DataLab is establishing a new facility to enable researchers to generate novel insights from complex, multidimensional data using cutting-edge virtual reality (VR) hardware and immersive visualization software.
DataLab partners with UC Davis Medical Center to build COVID models
The UC Davis DataLab has been working with the UC Davis Medical Center (UCDMC) over the past several months to improve their models for predicting COVID-19.
Student Spotlight – Ambar Mishra
We spotlight Ambar Mishra, a 3rd year statistics major at UC Davis, and his story moving through our programs during the 2020-2021 school year--from data science aspirant to successful job applicant!
Spring Letter from the Director
UC Davis DataLab Executive Director Carl Stahmer reflects the accomplishments of the DataLab through the pandemic, and shares plans as we move forward.
Data Challenges as Opportunities for Experiential learning: Reflection on DataLab’s CA Election 2020 Data Challenge
As a case study to explore how intentionally organized data challenges can serve as opportunities for short-format experiential learning, we discuss our experience organizing a month-long data challenge sponsored by the UC Davis DataLab: Data Science and Informatics department and the Scholars Strategy Network that coincided with the November 2020 election.
Spring DataLab Research Startup Projects
The start of a new quarter brings exciting new projects to the DataLab! Undergraduate students from our inaugural Adventures in Data Science course will be joining DataLab staff to assist with 7 research projects across the UC Davis community.
Data Feminism Symposium
The UC Davis DataLab is hosting a symposium dedicated to asking: "Data science for whom? Data science by whom? Data science with whose interests in mind?"
Hack for California Research and Learning Cluster Featured
The Hack for California Research and Learning Cluster was featured on the Public Scholarship and Engagement website through a blog post made by cluster lead Dr. Lindsay Poirier.
Join #maptimeDavis Council
UC Davis DataLab's Spatial Sciences Research & Learning Cluster is convening the #maptimeDavis Council, a new advisory panel for their activities, including the #maptimeDavis Workshop Series.
DataLab’s Text Analysis Platform Quintessence at Shakespeare Association of America
The DataLab team debuted the new capabilities of our NLP and text mining platform called "Quintessence".
Cross-institution and Multidisciplinary Research Forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture
Dr. Michele Tobias announces upcoming chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture.
Contribute to the DataLab Toolkits!
The DataLab has made our Researcher Toolkits capable of accepting community contributions through Github!
Health Data Science Spotlight
We asked the graduate students involved in the Health Data Science & Systems Research and Learning cluster about the work they are doing to advance their own research and enrich the cluster community.
Call for Proposals to Enhance the DataLab Community
The UC Davis DataLab is seeking to support and foster community activities and engagement in data science at UC Davis.
Call for 2021 Start-Up Research Project Collaborations
UC Davis DataLab: Data Science and Informatics is accepting applications from UC Davis Faculty and professional researchers for Start-Up Project Collaborations for the 2021 academic year. These exploratory, or early phase, research projects pair domain area researchers with DataLab’s data scientists in order to test basic hypotheses related to data-driven domain problems. This represents a […]
UC Love Data Week
The UC Davis DataLab coordinated 11 workshops attracting 905 registrations from across the UCs and CSUs.
DataLab Geospatial Specialist Dr. Michele Tobias Elected to Board of OSGeo
DataLab's own Dr. Michele Tobias has been elected to the board of directors for OSGeo, an international foundation with wide ranging efforts in open source geospatial community.
WINTER COURSE: Adventures in Data Science, Quarter 1
Winter quarter 2021 DataLab directors Carl Stahmer and Pamela Reynolds are hosting a Data science course right in here the DataLab! The first course in a two part series will offer a hands on introduction to data science for social science and humanities undergraduates. This first course (Winter 2021) is classroom based where students will […]
Data Driven Transit Report
A new report co-authored by former DataLab Postdoctoral Scholar Jane Carlen illuminates the factors that impact bicycling comfort. Read the full report here. In this study, researchers use survey data to analyze bicycling comfort and its relationship with socio-demographics, bicycling attitudes, and bicycling behavior. An existing survey of students, faculty, and staff at UC Davis […]
Data Challenge Winners
With the presentation of the showcase (recording available here), the California Election Data Challenge 2020 has concluded! We want to thank everyone who participated and volunteered their time to the project. Congratulations go out to the three winning teams, install.packages(“tidywitches”), MissDemeanors, and Catch-22, with honorable mention going to teams Dialysis Analysis and Wobbler Costs. You […]
DataLab Projects Featured on European Geosciences Union Blog
DataLab’s own Dr. Oliver Kreylos showcased his work on the European Geosciences Union Blog this week, discussing an array of his work and the value of immersive visualization technology. Read his post here to learn more about his research. FacebookTweetLinkedIn
EBBA Unveils New Features
The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) reveals a new and improved website today! The new design is the culmination of significant work by several of our DataLab Scholars. Changes include: A major site re-design including responsive design for mobile browsing. Ballad views have extensive new features! Get information from the text with a single click […]
CA Election 2020 Data Challenge
In collaboration with the Scholar Strategy Network we are launching the California Election 2020 Data Challenge leveraging data science and public data to help us understand this year’s ballot initiatives. All members of the UC Davis community can participate; students and postdoctoral scholars are eligible to win up to $500 awards. About the Challenge: Participants […]
Informatics for CA Water Data
Establishing data management workflows to develop and implement a database architecture for Sustainable Groundwater Management data from multiple geographies and organizations. Data fragmentation is one of the most challenging aspects of water governance and research. Data about water management organizations, infrastructure projects, permits, hydrological features, water supply, and water quality are collected via different systems, […]
Bibliographic approach to the role of science in policy making
Tracing citations in U.S. National Environmental Policy Act compliant reports and role of science in decision-making. Although science-informed policymaking is frequently touted as a solution to policy design and implementation dilemmas (e.g., Howlett 2009; Cairney 2016; Parkhurst 2017) there are few empirical studies of how scientific information informs policy making (Desmarais and Hird 2014; Newman et […]
Assessing data on services utilization of children with Autism
Harmonizing data to help identify care improvement targets for children with complex issues such as Autism. Lack of access to combined mental health, educational and developmental disabilities services data limits our ability to understand how essential services provided by these systems can affect outcomes for children. While limited research to date suggests that services in […]
Activating Ocean Acidification Research
Mapping OA data in space and time along the western USA with Bodega Marine Laboratory researchers and students. DataLab is partnering with Professor Tessa Hill at the Bodega Marine Laboratory to support efforts to develop an oceanographic synthesis of publicly available datasets to understand how changing ocean conditions will impact coastal habitats along the western […]
Extracting wine price data from historical catalogs
Developing programmatic workflows to activate the UC Davis archives for wine economists and historians. This project is a collaboration between the DataLab and UC Davis Library funded by the Sloan Foundation to extract historical price data from an archive of wine catalogs published by Sherry Lehmann. The primary goal of the project was to create […]
Identifying minimum infrastructure needs for comfortable bicycling
We analyzed transportation survey data from the UC Davis community in which individuals were asked to rate their comfort level biking on certain streets based on 10-second videos of those streets. We implemented Bayesian models with random effects to determine which features of streets and individuals had the strongest relationships with comfort ratings. Not surprisingly, […]
Creating Co-Author Networks in R
A co-author network is a great way to get a snapshot view of the breadth and depth of an individual’s body of research. I created such graphs and corresponding visualizations to highlight and celebrate the work of UC Davis scholars. In this post I will describe the packages I used to do this, common roadblocks […]
Archive-Vision
Archive-Vision (archv or arch-v) is a collection of computer vision programs written in C++ which utilizes functions from the OpenCV library to perform analysis on large image sets. The primary function is to locate recurring patterns within each image in a set of images. Arch-v locates features from a given seed image within an imageset […]
Chronicling the rise of “creativity”
Combining OCR and NLP to explore the discourse of creativeness in American newspapers since the mid-1800s. The Creativeness Digital Scholarship Group (CDSG) is composed of a team of researchers uncovering and exploring the forgotten sources, meanings, and social worlds of creativeness prior to the meteoric rise of a scientific “creativity” in the 1970s. The CDSG’s […]
Digitizing American Viticultural Areas (AVAs)
Collaborative project mapping wine regions for environmental sciences, history and economics of American viticulture research applications. DataLab, in conjunction with UCSB, Virginia Tech, other partner organizations, and contributions from the general public, are creating a publicly accessible geospatial version American Viticultural Areas boundaries. Using the text descriptions from the ATPF Code of regulations, we are […]
New Collaboration: Shared Cataloging of Early Printed Images
Through the generous support of The Getty Foundation, The UC Davis Library is working to develop an infrastructure that leverages Content Based image Recognition (CBIR) to facilitate shared cataloging of early printed images from the early modern period. Our vision is to develop an environment in which a cataloger or archivist who is describing an image […]
Assessing Impact of Outreach through Software Citation in Geodynamics
The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics is a community of software users and user-developers who model physical processes in the Earth and planetary interiors. From 2010-2018, the community of researchers published upward of 638 peer reviewed papers in more than 124 venues. We analyzed this corpus of publications to understand the impact of CIG workshops and […]
Social Networks of Citation
Tracing scholarly influence in medicine. The purpose of this project was to create a peer network of all publications and collaborations that span from a single faculty member. Through mining med-lined data, the network was successfully created. Project partners: Richard Kravitz (Researcher), Bruce Abbott (Health Sciences Librarian), Ranjodh Dhaliwal (Graduate Researcher) FacebookTweetLinkedIn
English Short Title Catalogue
This project was originally intended to create a, “machine-readable catalogue of books, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1701-1800.” Project partners: Brian Geiger (Principal Investigator), Luis Baquera (Principal Investigator), Nick Laiacona (Principal Investigator) FacebookTweetLinkedIn
Places in Walt Whitman
Merging text mining and the geospatial sciences to map the poetry of Walt Whitman. The American poet Walt Whitman worked during the period of transition from transcendentalism to realism and, due to this, many of his writings are rooted in physical spaces. Uncovering those spatial relationships provides another lens by which to understand American literature. […]
Predicting Length of Hospital Stays
One of the most significant problems that hospitals across the country are facing at the moment is the prediction of how long each patient will remain in said hospital. This project is attempting to build a better predictive model by taking into account both quantitative and qualitative data from hospitals. The main source of information […]
Gender and Citation Disparities
Leveraging bibliometrics to measure the impact of scholarly publications and explore under-representation and attribution in science. Citation counts help a research community understand the importance of a given scholarly work. But, implicit bias can affect how researchers cite one another. By employing bibliometrics and text mining, we aided researchers in the social sciences to explore […]
BIBFLOW
BIBFLOW is a two-year project that is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The purpose of this project is to investigate the future of library services that can include cataloging and related workflows, new data models, and new encoding and exchange formats. At the end of the two-year time table, there will […]
Play the Knave Modlab
The project, in coordination with the DSI, involves the creation of a gaming environment in which students recreate scenes from many works of Shakespeare. With this project, movement and vocal data are gathered as participants act out a given scene. From here, the data is taken and created into a video of the production and […]
The Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive
The Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive (http://pioneeringpunjabis.ucdavis.edu/) offers a window into the story of South Asian immigrants from the Punjab region in north India to California since the turn of the twentieth century. Explore over 700 video interviews, speeches, diaries, photographs, articles, and letters in which Punjabi Americans share their life stories, values, and contributions to […]