Category: Opportunities

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Africa Women in Data Science: Online Event

DARA Big Data (Development in Africa through Radio Astronomy), in partnership with the Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD), IDIA (Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy) and SARAO (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory) is hosting a free 3-day Africa Women in Data Science online event. The event will coincide with International Women’s Day 2022 and will also mark the one year anniversary of the publication of the SARAO Women in Data Science report.

The event organisers hope to help build a thriving African community of female data scientists and promote skills development for women who are interested data science careers. Registration for the event closes January 31 2022.

The event will take place from 8-10 March 2022, which coincides with International Women’s Day. It aims to increase African women’s participation in the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) to build a prosperous, resilient Africa of the future. The integral role of African women for the 4IR will be discussed and various opportunities will be showcased for young women hoping to get into the field of data science.

Africa Women in Data Science is free to attend and will be split into a conference on Day 1 (March 8) and a hackathon on Days 2 and 3 (March 9-10). The conference will feature inspiring female panel discussions, presentations from leading industry experts and question and answer sessions. Day 1 is open to anyone across Africa with a keen interest in data science. To register for the conference, only complete the first section of the registration form.

Register here: https://www.astro4dev.org/2022/01/11/registration-open-for-africa-women-in-data-science-event-iwd2022/

Enquiries can be emailed to linzi.stirrup@manchester.ac.uk

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Open Science Fair Symposium

BHKi (The bioinformatics hub of Kenya) and OpenScienceKE are proud to announce a new project, Empowering Researchers with Skills and Tools in Open Science and Bioinformatics.

This will consist of a series of events that will bring together researchers enthusiastic about bioinformatics and open science. The first virtual event is the Open Science FAIR symposium from October 11th-15th, 2021. The event aims to sensitise participants on FAIR open data science practices such as project planning and organisation, collaboration, licensing and data sharing. It exposes participants to use open science tools that facilitate these practices.

Register here to participate.

The organisers are also looking for presenters who have used open science practices to present their work and methods to fellow researchers. Register here to share your work. 

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Free Learning Opportunities with the AAL

South African students are eligible to register to join the next cohort of the African Launchpad initiative (AAL), which offers free nanodegrees through Coursera, edX, and Udacity. The courses include the fields of artificial intelligence, games and applications development and virtual reality.

The initiative was first announced in Egypt in 2018, and is an Africa-wide platform that aims to build capacity of Egyptian and African youth and foster the establishment of sustainable African startups in the area of the advanced ever-changing app and game technologies. AAL works by availing a high-quality, technology-learning online platform through crowd-sourcing top online content developed by prestigious universities and leading companies, and delivered through three leading MOOCs (Coursera, edX, and Udacity). Participants will need to dedicate approximately 10 hours per week throughout the track duration in order to be able to finish in time.

To register, click here, and to find out more details and available learning tracks, click here.

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Upcoming DMP Workshop

CREATING A RESEARCH DATA MANAGEMENT PLAN

The Division for Postgraduate Studies (DPGS), the eResearch Office and the Library. 

Research Data Management Plans (DMPs) are central to the research process, and are aligned closely with the UWC Research Data Management (RDM) Policy and the Protection of Private Information Act (POPIA). An upcoming workshop will provide an overview of DMPs, why a postgraduate student would need one, and a practical guide as to how to craft one.

Duration: 2 hours
Time: 11:00-13:00
Date: 16 August 2021
Platform: Zoom
Facilitators: Sarah Schäfer (eResearch Office), Mark Snyders (Library) and Janine Senekal (DPGS)

Register for the workshop

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IBM Research Africa to host a Virtual Seminar Series on ‘What’s Next in AI (Artificial Intelligence)’

As AI continues to mature, nations around the globe are adopting it more and more to drive large-scale transformation and competitiveness; Africa is no stranger to this. From agriculture and health services to translating languages, AI can play an important role in helping Africa tackle economic problems.

Creating an AI ecosystem and forging local and global relationships is vital. During the past decade, local groups of industry practitioners and researchers have been actively hosting events, including Data Science Africa and Deep Learning Indaba, towards this goal. The African machine learning community has been steadily growing.

This August, on 18th and 25th, IBM Research Africa is inviting academics, students, developers, researchers and AI practitioners to a dialogue on the future of AI through this series of seminars delivered by some of IBM Research’s leading Scientists in Africa and other global labs. With a focus on advances in trustworthy AI, neural and symbolic learning, reasoning and language understanding, this series will launch a continent-wide conversation on the future of AI and the role of the African computing community in inventing what’s next for AI in Africa.

To learn more on the event, follow the link here and to register, click here.

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Upcoming Kikapu Webinar

The Library and the eResearch Office will be hosting a webinar that focuses on our Institutional Data Repository, Kikapu.

The webinar will take place on 30 August at 11am.
Register here.

Kikapu is UWC’s online institutional research data repository. It is a versatile platform for publishing and accessing research data and scholarly outputs, and accepts a wide variety of non-traditional research outputs and file formats. Research data and any associated documents can be stored and shared in either primary or refined versions.

Read more about Kikapu.

Introduction to Research Data Management and Kikapu

The webinar will cover the following:

Introduction to Research Data Management (RDM) and Kikapu:
– What is research data 
– Why publish research data
– Open Access
– FAIR Data principles


Introduction to Kipaku – UWC’s Institutional Research Data Repository
– Creating an account
– Uploading content (datasets)
– Publishing uploaded content (datasets)
– Citing published content
– Tracking record statistics

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DIRISA Student Datathon Competition

DIRISA (the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa) has organised a student datathon to showcase how open research data can be used to come up with creative and innovative solutions to some of South Africa’s problems. It is open to undergraduate and graduate students above the age of 18, and is free to enter.

DIRISA is one of the three pillars of South Africa’s National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure System (NICIS), and will be hosting the virtual four day tournament from 26 to 29 July 2021.

In this annual event, student teams from South African universities compete in the development of software applications based on data science, artificial intelligence and other leading edge technologies, to solve relevant South African challenges. Last year’s theme was To provide a South African solution related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2021, participants will be expected to source open datasets to find solutions.

Here is the link for the event page https://sdc.dirisa.ac.za/.

Registration is open, and the competition begins on 26 July.

Find out more and sign up to enter.

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Introducing ESCALATOR

An exciting addition to the South Africa Digital Humanities (DH) landscape, ESCALATOR has recently launched, and aims to establish a local community of practice within DH. SADiLaR (the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources) is behind the project which will focus on the adoption of digital research methodologies and practices to the Social Sciences and Humanities.

“Humanities and Social Sciences research and education are in dire need of strong coordinated interventions to enable the pervasive adoption of digital research methodologies and practices. Over the past few years several capacity development initiatives were implemented within various institutions and communities, but South Africa still lacks a national, integrated active community of practice in this space”.

SADiLaR

Working groups like Python study group and the R study group provide valuable long-term learning opportunities and supportive communities. Additionally, the ESCALATOR Digital Champions Initiative is a multi-track mentorship and networking programme that complements other activities, and is open to researchers, professional staff, and students from the 26 public universities and research councils in South Africa.

Find out more about the project.

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The State of Open Data Survey 2021

Every year, Figshare, in partnership with Digital Science and Springer Nature, conducts the largest survey of its kind to discover global attitudes towards open data.

Researchers from around the world are invited to participate in The State of Open Data Survey 2021.

The aim of the survey is to find out about global experiences and attitudes towards sharing data, how researchers handle research data, the challenges that researchers and institutions face in regard to data, and its impact on workload and resources.

Read about the results of the 2020 survey here.

Survey completion time: approximately 20 minutes
Closing date: Friday 30th July
Prize draw: One of five $100 gift cards

Take the survey

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Upcoming REDCap Webinar: Take Control Of Electronic Data Capture And Workflow

The eResearch Office invites researchers and students to participate in a webinar on REDCap on Tuesday 6 July at 11am.

REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a browser-based, metadata-driven Electronic Data Capture (EDC) software and workflow methodology for designing clinical and translational research databases. It is widely used in the academic research community: the REDCap Consortium is a collaborative, international network of more than 2400 institutional partners in over 115 countries, with more than 590,000 total end-users employing the software for more than 450,000 ongoing research studies.

REDCap users can benefit from a broad range of data collection functionality, and take control of their data collection work. It is a powerful tool for secure methods of flexible and robust data collection, and although it was originally developed for the Health Sciences, it can be used in any discipline.

The webinar will include an introduction to the REDCap platform and its main features, a demonstration on how REDCap data can be used for analysis and visualisation, as well as brief presentations of use cases by colleagues at UWC. We will conclude with questions directed at the panel.

We will also be addressing any UWC-specific related REDCap queries, and if there are any pressing questions that you would like to raise, please feel free to email us prior to the webinar at eresearch-support@uwc.ac.za

REDCAP Webinar Details

Date: Tuesday 6 July 
Time: 11:00 am
Register in advance: https://uwc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrdO6gqD4oGtX-_HRfWxFJIhbVWq-tAQSU

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

We look forward to seeing you there.