Data Science Office Hours provide multiple routes to get help with your research

The eScience Institute’s Data Science Office Hours program brings together expertise from across campus and outside affiliates to help triage your challenges in data-intensive science and steer you towards appropriate solutions. Between our staff data scientists, the UW libraries, UW-IT, and the other organizations listed on this page, we can help with a broad range of topics including data analysis, cloud computing, AI/ML, high-performance computing, and software engineering, and more.

During an office hour, you can expect us to learn about your work, offer guidance for overcoming obstacles, and consult on further avenues to take your research. We may schedule a longer follow-up meeting with our team to understand the problem more deeply, or refer you to faculty on campus with relevant expertise. In addition to direct assistance and triage, we see office hours as an opportunity to brainstorm about data-intensive research questions and approaches. We fully expect that some of these discussions will lead to productive collaborative research opportunities. Some office hour collaborations have grown into full publications and new research grants!

All UW students, faculty, staff and affiliates are eligible provided that your request is regarding research being conducted as a part of the UW community. For help with course-work and academics, we refer you to UW Academic Support and the UW Libraries.

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Drop-in Office Hours by Topic

During the UW Academic Year’s dates of instruction, the Institute holds regularly scheduled drop-in office hours by topic. You can find a schedule of this quarter’s topic offerings below. You can click on a given topic to RSVP for the current week. While RSVPs are not required and do not guarantee help priority, they help us gauge demand and prepare in advance if you have any special topics you would like to discuss.

If you need help with a topic that isn’t listed below, or have a scheduling conflict with the listed time, just schedule a one-on-one office hour with us instead. We can still help you!

Drop-in Schedule for Spring Quarter 2025 (March 31st – June 13th)

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday

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Office Hours By Appointment

Year round, you can reach out to eScience staff and affiliates over email to schedule a one-on-one office hour appointment. Don’t be shy! It’s part of our job to be in touch with you about data science obstacles you’re facing. The office hour directory below is organized into the following sub-organizations:

eScience Data Scientists | Data Science and Public Policy | UW Libraries | UW-IT and Research Computing | UW-IT EIIA – Tableau & Analytics | Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) Statistical Consulting | Mathworks

eScience Data Scientists

We encourage questions from any area of computing in science, but tend to focus on data management, predictive analytics, and visualization.

Data Science & Public Policy Hours

The intersection of data science and public policy is exciting and nuanced. The eScience Institute’s network includes affiliates who are happy to help you both with using data science to research policy questions and advising on how public policy affects the use of data.

UW Librarian Hours

UW librarians provide support for finding and accessing data, data management planning, data organization, reuse of data, data sharing and storage, data citation, instruction, literature review, publications, citation management tools, and more.

Research Computing Hours

Office hours are offered to help researchers, UW IT professionals and students learn about options and opportunities in research computing. We can review UW-native systems such as Hyak, cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform, and national resources such as the XSEDE grid computing platform.

We are available to discuss cost, grant opportunities, data security, collaboration tools, system architecture and the array of tools, technologies, solutions and platforms available to help you focus on your research rather than on building or reinventing computing infrastructure. We can also help you connect with other research teams in the UW community with similar interests and experiences. Our first priority is to determine what you are working on and where your issues and challenges lie towards helping you find best solutions.

UW-IT EIIA – Tableau & Analytics

The Enterprise Information Integration and Analytics (EIIA) team is able to provide information and support for Tableau and UW’s enterprise data offerings. Please come talk to us if you have questions about:

Tableau: Licensing, Use cases, Technical issues
Enterprise Information Integration and Analytics: What’s available? How do I get access? What tools can I connect with?

Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) Statistical Consulting

CSSS provides free statistical consulting to current UW faculty, staff, and students in affiliated departments. Our consultants offer guidance at any stage of a project from study design and planning through the selection statistical methods to the interpretation of model results. However, we recommend involving a statistician at the earliest stage possible, as this ensures the best scientific foundation for statistical analyses. Please note that CSSS consultants do not generally provide statistical software support nor do consultants run analyses for consulting clients. Services include:

• Planning analyses and building hypotheses to test
• Regression modeling for continuous, discrete, and categorical outcomes
• Regression modeling for dependent and independent data
• Survey design
• Visit the CSSS website to learn more.

Mathworks Hours

eScience has partnered with Mathworks in order to provide students, faculty and staff support for MATLAB, Simulink and Source Control (git). MATLAB® is the high-level language and interactive environment used by millions of engineers and scientists worldwide. It lets you explore and visualize ideas and collaborate across disciplines including signal and image processing, communications, control systems, and computational finance. Simulink® is a block diagram environment for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design. It supports simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems.