Category: News

• How Busy are National Parks and other Public Lands? Researchers Hone Methods for Estimating Visitation

  

  Visits to national parks are on the rise. In 2024, the National Park Service set a new record of 332 million recreation visits, with over 6 million more visitors than the previous year.  While these numbers indicate growing interest in outdoor recreation, climbing visitation rates present challenges for land managers working to prevent environmental damage…

• $20 Million Grant to Provide Commercial Cloud Resources to National Research Community

  

  by Cynthia Dillon, SDSC Communications The University of Washington will partner on a $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for the acquisition and deployment of commercial cloud resources to support approximately 500 research projects annually across the nation over the next five years. CloudBank 2: Accelerating Science and Engineering Research in the…

• July Meetup for Research Software Engineers

  

  Join us for the Seattle Research Software Engineer (RSE) Meetup, a FREE event hosted and sponsored by the eScience Institute at the University of Washington.This introductory networking event is a great opportunity for Research Software Engineers, developers, and scientists in the Seattle area to connect, network, and build a community of RSEs. Whether you’re an experienced RSE…

• Announcing the 2023 Data Science Incubator Projects

  

  The eScience’s annual Data Science Incubator program kicked off last week, which enables new research discoveries by bringing together data scientists and domain scientists to work on focused, intensive, collaborative projects. Our team of data scientists provide expertise in state-of-the-art technology and methods in large-scale data manipulation and analytics, cloud and cluster computing, statistics and…

• Vani Mandava joins UW as Head of Engineering for SSEC

  

  Vani Mandava joins UW as Head of Engineering to build a world-class software engineering team to transform scientific software development. The University of Washington eScience Institute welcomes Vani Mandava as the Head of Engineering for the newly formed UW Scientific Software Engineering Center SSEC (pronounced S Seek). Vani has most recently been leading Trustworthy AI research engagements…

• Black-owned restaurants disproportionately impacted during pandemic

  

  During the first year of the pandemic, and amid protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, tech companies such as Google, Yelp and DoorDash started “Black-owned” labelling campaigns to encourage customer support for restaurants and other businesses. But new research, using cellphone location data, shows that visits to restaurants that identify as…

• Interdisciplinary Team Creates Tool to Detect and Quantify Satellite Streaks

  

  By: Emily Keller-O’Donnell  The recent growth of low-Earth-orbit satellites is posing a threat to a range of groups who rely on the sky for science, spirituality and tradition, by leaving a plethora of bright streaks across the night sky. A project team at the University of Washington Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program is…

• Research Team Examines the Impacts of Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance on Household-Level Poverty

  

  By: Emily Keller-O’Donnell Research about the relationship between poverty and the minimum wage in Seattle has often focused on examining the economic circumstances of individual workers. One of the projects of the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) summer program at the University of Washington is expanding this lens to create data that views workers…

• Interdisciplinary Team Designs Database to Advance ‘Self-Sufficiency Standard’ Research

  

  By: Emily Keller-O’Donnell Determining the income level that working families need to meet their basic needs requires a dynamic approach. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Washington (UW) Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program is laying the groundwork for the integration of multi-sourced data from across the U.S. to provide researchers and policy…

• Applying ‘Geospatial First’ Approach to Estimating Heating Loads in Alaska

  

  By: Emily Keller-O’Donnell Decarbonization efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change face a unique challenge in Alaska. While about 70 percent of energy use in the state goes to heating, there is a lack of reliable broad-scale data on the portion of energy that is used for heating in buildings. An interdisciplinary team at…