 for us to get started because there's a lot of material in the session. I'm Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and I'd like to welcome you to day two of the second week of our fall 2020 virtual CNI member meeting. This week is themed around the transformation of organizations and professions. A lot of teaching and learning material and material about skill development. I'm delighted you're with us today. I would note that this session is being recorded. There is closed captioning available if you wanna turn that on. There is a chat which is active and you're welcome to use that to introduce yourself or make comments. There is also a Q&A tool and after we hear all the presentations we will have a question and answer session which Diane Goldenberg-Hart of CNI will moderate. Feel free to pose questions using the Q&A tool at any time. And I think that's all of the mechanics that I need to talk about. Just to briefly introduce the session we have three speakers. Florence Hudson is back to again. She did a wonderful talk last week and she is the director of the Northeastern Data Hub based at Columbia University. She's joined by Jennifer Oxen Ford and Yusuf Denisman. And we also have in the audience another part of her team, Leslie Labart who may jump in during the Q&A. The topic today is this wonderful program they've set up to build up student data literacy. They call it the Northeast Student Data Core and it's really a wonderful example of how you can build up fairly widespread data literacy and data skills among students very much to their benefit as they engage in scholarship and move on to the workforce. With that Florence will start things off and I just wanna thank our speakers so much for joining us to do this presentation. Over to you Florence. Thank you very much Cliff and thank you so much for having us. We were so excited when this presentation was accepted because we really wanna spread the word about how we can all build data literacy and the Northeast Student Data Core is a new program we just launched at the Northeast Big Data Hub very recently and Jennifer and Yusuf are both on the founding committee as well as Leslie who's in the audience. So a little bit about us. So this is me, Executive Director for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub. Jennifer is the Director of Research and Community Engagement at Kinber which is the Research and Education Network in Pennsylvania she's in the Philly area. Leslie Labart who's on the Q and A side is a librarian in the Seneca District Libraries and so we thought this would be really pertinent to this audience and community talking about not just how we leverage colleges like where Yusuf is from Yusuf Donizman as assistant professor at Queensborough Community College which is part of the CUNY system in New York, the City University of New York. So we can leverage community colleges as well as libraries to build data literacy which is really an exciting opportunity. So the Northeast Student Data Core was launched as part of a seed fund program that we have. The Northeast Big Data Hub is one of four big data hubs around the country and we have NSF grants supporting us and as part of that we have a seed fund every year and to fuel data literacy, education and the leverage of data science for good. And so as part of that we announced this Northeast Student Data Core and it's a community developed initiative very important in the Northeast Hub we listen to the community and say, what do you need? How can we work together and how can we help you? You know, as I say, we're your tax dollars at work so we wanna make sure that we're providing real value and the goal is to teach data science fundamentals to students across the Northeastern U.S. and we have solution hubs with a special focus on underserved institutions and students. So students who are affiliated with an institution can participate and even students who are not who are really trying to grow their data science skills because as many of us know data science is going to become more and more important in the workforce. So when we launched this we announced a founding committee to say, okay so can some of you jump in and help us create this? You know, this is community driven. So we have 21 people on this founding committee from industry, faculty, students and not-for-profit leaders are working in partnership with our hub leadership team to develop around three key team areas content and pedagogy, peer instruction and outreach to increase the data science literacy across the Northeast. And you could at any time go to any big data hub at work slash NSDC which is where we keep the material on this. So the founding committee is planning, designing and we'll launch the Northeast student data core activities in partnership with our hub leadership team. And this is really an opportunity to contribute to the creation of what we believe is a groundbreaking and inclusive new program in data science. This is free to the people who use it it will be on an open website. And there are three teams that are leading this effort. One is I mentioned content and pedagogy, peer instruction and outreach. So let's look at what are the aspirational outcomes overall and particular by each of these teams. And we have team leaders for each of these. Yusef is one of the content and pedagogy team leaders which is wonderful. On that team, the three team leaders are from industry. We have someone from IBM because they're actually donating their open data science for all material from GitHub for this. We have Yusef who is an educator at Queensborough Community College which is a minority serving institution. And then we have a grad student which is Fred who's from Princeton. So in the content and pedagogy team their aspirational outcomes are that when we're successful we will have a curriculum of respected data science materials and video and audio enabling data science literacy. So multimedia. And our goal is that like a year from now we have hundreds of students of all ages beginning with higher ed with new data science skills. The peer instructors team is actually co-led by three of our undergraduates at Columbia University who work part-time while they're going to school as juniors at Columbia. And they work part-time for the Northeast Big Data Hub. So together they lead the peer instructors team. So their goal is to have this peer instructor team or a number of teams that are teaching and coaching data science students across the Northeast. So the idea here is that students are working with students. We're creating a very collaborative opportunity and culture right from the beginning. So the ones who are learning it get to coach the next ones. And then underserved institutions and students will be learning data science, fundamentals and applications in collaboration with other students across the Northeast. So part of where this whole idea came from is I grew up as an engineer I'm an aerospace mechanical engineer and we have very separate cohort organizations in engineering. Society of women engineers for women and SB for black engineers, shift for Hispanic professional engineers, ASIS for Native Americans. And my goal is always to get us all working together. So our goal here is to really create this very inclusive environment right from the beginning in data science. And it's so important because as we know there are a lot of ethical considerations, bias considerations in data science, the data you choose to use, the perspective you use, what the algorithms do and having many voices and points of view is your develop your data science skills and your data science applications. So teaching these students to work together is gonna be so critical. Then the outreach team, which Jennifer is one of the co-leaders for, our goal is that as we develop this that industry academia and not for profits are enabling data science literacy working together. And that student internships for translational data science experiences with real world use cases will be available from industry, from government. So we're very excited about this. And overall our overarching mission is that we develop a culture of inclusivity with students teaching and supporting students across the digital divides. So in these three teams, as you look at where we are in our next steps, we've just been around for about a month, but we're going quickly. We've been gathering content. For example, IBM is donating all their open data science for all on GitHub. They have about 16 data science modules. And we're looking at that to get us jump started. So we're building a curriculum. We're gonna attract presenters to record audio with the core modules. So that it's not just reading things on GitHub, but there's actually a voice and a face that goes with it. And we're thinking we would like multiple presenters for each module so that you could kind of pick someone that you think may think like you or look like you. You know, we wanna be able to make this very inclusive and help the students identify with the people in data science and the material they're learning with all the content pedagogy. The peer instructors team has to coordinate with the content pedagogy team to find the right type of mentors and peer instructors needed based on the curriculum and then attract students to develop virtual study hall hours and mentoring. And the outreach team is reaching out to minority serving institutions to attract adult learners like Yusef and others and reach out to data science faculty and students to go to the pit, the peer instructors team and then reach out to industry to plan student internships and use data science skills. So now that I've talked to you about kind of the goal and the vision and our first steps, what I wanna do is hand this over to Yusef and we're really very lucky that he's part of this team because he actually makes this come to life. So Yusef, I'd like to hand it over to you and I'd be happy to advance the slides as you're ready. Thank you very much, Florence. Hello everybody. My name is Yusef Tenesman. I am an assistant professor at Queensborough Community College, which is one of the campuses of the City University of New York. And today I would like to talk about a program that I will run during the spring semester. Its name is Data Science Training and Research Program. And in this program, you will see real application of how the sources provided by North East Student Data Corp can be used in an institution, especially in a community college. And so basically I will be, I am a part of the North East Student Data Corp because I am one of the co-leaders and also I am using it. So and I will try to show the real application as much as possible. First, let's talk about Queensborough Community College very briefly. So Queensborough Community College is one of the most diverse campuses in the US. So in our college, the percentage of what student is just 15%. And we have mostly Hispanic, Black and Asian students. And now let's, let me talk about, briefly about the workshop. So it is going to be fully online due to the Corona and our focus will be on the coding and the data science skills. And in this program, 10 to 15 students will be recruited and it is going to be for the whole spring semester. So it is going to be approximately for 15 weeks. And this program is supported by a seed fund grant from the North East Big Data Innovation Hub. And today we applied to be prepared a lab proposal and we are expecting to have a lab in us soon in our community college with this grant with the help of this grant. And so next, I want to talk about the content of the program. So first we will cover the Python as a programming language. Then we will cover some data science and machine learning subjects. And the last part will be about capstone group projects in which we will cover some real world problems. And during the program, also there will be some talks by professionals in industry and academia. And let's move to the next slide. So it is open to all students, but especially the female students and students of colors. They are strongly encouraged to apply this program. And so the first benefit of this project is as I mentioned, just a couple of minutes ago, a proposal to establish a data science lab at a community college is submitted in October and today in the morning, I received an email from the dean. So it will be approved very, very soon. So this might be the first example of a data science lab in a community college. And another benefit is right now, we do not have any data science program, degree program in our knowledge. So hopefully we will have degree programs in very near future. Another benefit will be, so after this program, so our students, they will be more motivated, more eligible and they will be confident to continue their education. So they will be able to find more qualified jobs in the future. So they will be inspiring role models in their community, especially for underrepresented communities. This is very, very important. Also, so by doing all this, we will be able to increase and diversify the workforce that enters the tech sectors, especially the sectors related to the data science. And in my final slide, so I want to talk about how Nord is Big Data Innovation Hub and Nord is Student Data Corp support us. So first of all, we have the seed grants. So with the seed grant, we are gonna support our program and we will get our workshop materials and we will support the students. And Nord is Student Data Course, as mentioned, it has three teams and we will get benefit from each of these teams in this program. So the content and data budget team will provide the curriculum and sports materials, including PowerPoints, Jupyter notebooks with quotes, the videos, assignments and that kind of any material so they will provide us. And the peer instructor team will provide the mentors for our students. And the outreach team will find speakers and internship opportunities for our students. So as you can see, they are helping us, they are supporting us with all their power and I want to thank to them a lot and we will get the course materials and curriculum from Nord is Student Data Course. We will use them and our plan is improve them and give them back to Nord is Student Data Course so they can be also used in other workshops or in other programs. Thank you very much for listening to me. Yes, Seth, thank you very much. That was wonderful. And we're so lucky to have you as a teammate and a leader in this. You're making it so real for us and this will definitely have broader impact with many thanks to you. So thank you very much. Thank you. Now I'd like to pass it over to Jennifer Oxen Ford from Kinberg, the research and education network in Pennsylvania and she is speaking for her and her teammate, Leslie Labart, who's a librarian and Jennifer has worked closely with the libraries for a number of years between the IT and library organizations throughout Pennsylvania and higher ed and K through 12 and in the community. So I'd like to pass it over to her to talk about engagement with and through the libraries to build data literacy, leveraging the Northeast Student Data Course. Jennifer. Thank you so much, Florence and it really is a pleasure to be here with my co-presenters and sharing the information today in our presentation. So I'm delighted to talk a little bit briefly about engagement with libraries and we on the founding committee and certainly Leslie and I and Florence and others feel that it's so important to strategize and think through how we're going to continue to engage with libraries as part of this effort. So looking at efforts both in the region and nationally, such as the toward to give it libraries project in Pennsylvania that Leslie and I are involved in and other statewide efforts in the Northeast to build awareness and capacity among library personnel. The founding committee and the members of the team are working to consider novel ways that we can really engage public libraries around data science education and training. We feel that this is so important to think through and to really be strategic about how we can engage public libraries and build capacity so that they can support their communities around data science, education and literacy. As many of us and probably all of us on this call know libraries really are perceived by residents and communities as a safe place and especially now more than ever to be able to connect with resources, digital resources, network access and information and training. So how can we build on that and really build data science capacity and awareness into public libraries as they interact with our job seekers with students and teens and youth and even homeschoolers and groups that are meeting virtually now during the pandemic and especially in unserved and underserved communities. So we really are thinking about how to consider and build on the role of academic libraries public libraries and even school libraries to develop these essential data science literacies and skills and we welcome any and all feedback from CNI and the membership and the folks on this call to have input from you all as to how we can pursue this as we go along here. We all know, I think that libraries are extremely well positioned to be hubs and conveners of these types of essential data literacy and data science education and skills. Next slide, please Lawrence. So as part of the outreach committee, we wanted to leave you with this about how you can get involved with the Northeast Student Data Corps. Some of the ways that we've been thinking about how we can engage broader communities and get real feedback and involvement from folks across different sectors. Start thinking about, do you have data science innovation or curriculum assets and resources at your institution that you'd like to have more reach into new audiences? Do you wanna get more eyeballs on content that you've created or that you would be willing to make available as part of your broader reach activities? We would be delighted to include these in the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub data science curated resource portal and be able to provide additional access and engagement with those materials if you have them. Do you know of teachers or learners who would want to participate in the Northeast Student Data Corps? Are you or do you know faculty, researchers, students or industry experts that would want to get involved and participate? As you heard from Florence and Yousef, we are actively seeking peers and mentors in the field and speakers across these different communities. And so we'd welcome your participation or if you have someone in your network that you think should get involved, we would be so grateful if you would share the URL and information with them so that we can speak with them and maybe get them into the fold. And finally, are you working with minority serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities or other inclusivity and diversity efforts at your campus, library or organization that could benefit from the data science curriculum and resources that we've been sharing here today. These are just a small sampling of the ways that we think that you could get involved with the Northeast Student Data Corps but we're always open and receptive to hearing how you might want to get involved even if it's not specifically called out on this slide. So with that, maybe I'll turn it back to Florence to talk a little bit more about how to learn more about the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub generally. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Great job and thank you and Leslie for your insight in this material. So you can connect with us at the hub. If you are interested in getting involved in any of these things that any of us talked about today, reach out to us at contact at any bigdatahub.org. You can keep track of our progress at the Northeast Student Data Corps at any bigdatahub.org slash nsdc and there are other materials available and avenues to connect with us when you go to the website any bigdatahub.org. You can join an event. We have a number of events, a lot of COVID related events, COVID information commons. We also like to curate success stories from around the region, the Northeast region, which is Pennsylvania, New Jersey, all the way up to Maine, those nine states. And so if you have something you've done in the health area or education data literacy or leveraging data science, we'd love to hear from you and put you, as I say on our refrigerator, under a refrigerator magnet, put you on our website so we can brag about the cool things that you're doing with data science. You can join us as a collaborator, sign up for our mailing list and we have a lot of videos on YouTube as well. And once again, all of this is available through any bigdatahub.org. So now we're ready to go to Q&A and we're delighted that you've given us the chance to talk about this today. We hope we've inspired you to think about how you can build data science literacy through programs like this. And this will all be available on the NSDC page at the Northeast Big Data Hub website so you can actually take advantage of it as it rolls out. So now, if we could, I would only wanna thank Jennifer and Yusuf for the presentation, Cliff for introducing us, Diane for patiently helping us get connected to this and we can open it up for Q&A. Thank you Florence and thank you so much, Jennifer and Yusuf, for your contributions to our meeting. This is such a tremendous project, fulfilling a really great need and we're so delighted to have you at CNI to talk about it and share it with our community. As Florence said, the floor is now open for questions. We'd love to hear from you. We have another collaborator on the line to field questions having to do with library involvement in this and with that I will launch right into a question that we've received from Brian Sinclair who asks if there are any plans for expansion, a Southeast core perhaps. What a great question. So we are looking at how we can collaborate with the other big data hubs because we've all kind of been doing our own thing because we're regionally focused but there are a lot of really great education data literacy programs in the South. So we just had actually an NSF retreat with all four hubs and we talked about how in the education area we really should pool our resources and what we're doing. So that's one of the steps we're gonna take. We're actually also involved in looking at proposals to broaden this to other regions and potentially nationally and kind of handily our nickname is NSDC, our acronym. So Northeast could easily become national if we got that far. So you never know. So we'll see what the interest is, what the success is, how we do, achieving our aspirational outcomes. But I always say I like to build an arc when we're going somewhere new. Everyone in the boat, let's figure this out together and help us get to where we wanna go. That's terrific, thanks. And that sounds like a call for partners. Oh, it is, we're always looking for partners. So everyone listening out there, let us know. So I think actually Clifford had a question that he wanted to ask you. Cliff, you wanna go ahead? Sure, this is sort of a general question that occurred to me. So this is quite regionally focused and it has a whole series of engagement strategies with institutions in the region and hopefully lots more as the program continues to expand. At the same time, there are some pretty good scale nationally and internationally focused efforts, one that comes to mind is the carpentries. And I'm wondering how you're connecting up to those kinds of efforts. Yeah, so we've spoken to the carpentries and a number of the hubs have already been leveraging the carpentries activities. I've audited one of the carpentries classes and what I find is that they provide kind of pedagogical teaching, how you teach. And so what we're trying to do here is to actually create the content that can be taught for data science because a lot of us know how to teach who've been around for a while and we're in higher ed. The question is really the content and the curriculum and how you would deliver it. So it could be that we leverage the carpentries further as we move forward with this, but that is one of the opportunities we do have. You're absolutely right. And I know there's a library's carpentries too and we're trying to figure out if that could be helpful. And that might come out of this as we move farther down the path. It could be that we see that that would add a lot of value and that's one of the options that we're holding open. Well, I know that at many of our member institutions, the libraries or the libraries in collaboration with other units like Research Computing or Central IT are already doing instruction various kinds of data management and data science things. So there should be lots of opportunities to connect in to there and for them to use the wonderful material that you're curating on your site. And I hope we'll see lots of that going forward. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah, and that's part of what we're thinking is, I was hungry for the content when I started looking at what was going on with that. So now that we're creating the content, it could be that the library's help, the library's carpentry could help as an example, maybe the librarians would like the pedagogical approach and we could partner the content with it. Cause I think that's how a lot of the institutions who are having carpentries classes are doing it or carpentries events is that they create their own material and they use that to teach the data science as part of it. So we used to call it a T3 in the old days, teach the teacher. So they teach the teachers how to teach and now we want to teach them the content too so they can teach the content. And so you're right, that could be a very nice marriage going into the future. Jennifer, did you want to add to that? I saw you leaning forward, I don't know. Oh, that's probably bad ergonomics on my part, but no, I think it's a really interesting question, Cliff. And I think that that's part of the reason why we were so delighted to speak to this group and to get input and thoughts from you all about who we should be talking to. I mean, obviously the founding committee in Florence alone have extensive networks and understanding some of the initiatives out there that we should be talking to and thinking about how we can most strategically partner, but we don't know what we don't know as Florence likes to say, I think sometimes. So getting the sense from you all and from the community, who we should be talking to, where the right intersection points really are is fantastic and that's exactly what we're looking for right now. So your feedback is essential. And Leslie is also chiming in on the chat, Florence, I don't know if we want to unmute her, Diane, and let Leslie chime in. Yeah, she's been unmuted. Go ahead, Leslie. I just wanted to add that for the small public libraries that I have 17 of, they have not had a lot of formal data science instruction coming out with from some of the master's programs or the library assistant programs that they have completed. So creating a training in a box for the varying skill levels that I have in order for them to effectively teach their communities is probably one of my biggest goals for this project because it is such an important skill for them to have in order to best serve their community. Very well stated. I love that idea, Leslie, training in a box. So we should think about how we can package that for the libraries as we move forward. Thank you very much. And for the school too. Thank you, Leslie, for that contribution. And thanks, Cliff, for that question. I see we're a little bit past time here. So I'm going to go ahead and close down the recording, shutting down the public portion of the presentation. And thank you again so much to our presenters for this really interesting project. We're going to be watching this closely to see how it develops. And we hope you'll come and give us an update. And thank you so much to our attendees for taking time to join us today. We hope we'll see you back at other CNI sessions in the coming weeks. To any attendees who are with us still, if you would like to hang around after I turn off the recording, raise your hand. I can unmute you and you can approach the podium as it were. Have a chat with our speakers, ask a question or make a comment, please feel free to do so. And with that, I will say goodbye, everyone. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day. Bye bye. Thank you.