Rewarding excellence in open knowledge

The second annual MIT Prize for Open Data, which included a $2,500 money prize, was lately awarded to 10 particular person and group analysis tasks. Presented collectively by the School of Science and the MIT Libraries, the prize highlights the worth of open knowledge — analysis knowledge that’s overtly accessible and reusable — on the Institute. The prize winners and 12 honorable point out recipients have been honored on the Open Data @ MIT occasion held Oct. 24 at Hayden Library. 

Conceived by Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries, and Rebecca Saxe, affiliate dean of the School of Science and the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the prize program was launched in 2022. It acknowledges MIT-affiliated researchers who use or share open knowledge, create infrastructure for open knowledge sharing, or theorize about open knowledge. Nominations have been solicited from throughout the Institute, with a concentrate on trainees: undergraduate and graduate college students, postdocs, and analysis employees. 

“The prize is explicitly geared toward early-career researchers,” says Bourg. “Supporting and inspiring the following technology of researchers will assist make sure that the way forward for scholarship is characterised by a norm of open sharing.”

The 2023 awards have been offered at a celebratory occasion held throughout International Open Access Week. Winners gave five-minute displays on their tasks and the function that open knowledge performs of their analysis. The program additionally included remarks from Bourg and Anne White, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering, vice provost, and affiliate vice chairman for analysis administration. White mirrored on the methods through which MIT has demonstrated its values with the open sharing of analysis and scholarship and acknowledged the efforts of the honorees and advocates gathered on the occasion: “Thank you for the energetic function you’re all taking part in in constructing a tradition of openness in analysis,” she mentioned. “It advantages us all.” 

Winners have been chosen from greater than 80 nominees, representing all 5 MIT colleges, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and a number of other analysis facilities throughout the Institute. A committee composed of college, employees, and graduate college students made the alternatives:

• Hammaad Adam, graduate pupil within the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, accepted on behalf of the group behind Organ Retrieval and Collection of Health Information for Donation (ORCHID), the primary ever multi-center dataset devoted to the organ procurement course of. ORCHID supplies the primary alternative to quantitatively analyze organ procurement group choices and determine operational inefficiencies.

• Adam Atanas, postdoc within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), and Jungsoo Kim, graduate pupil in BCS, created WormWideWeb.org. The web site, permitting researchers to simply browse and obtain C. elegans whole-brain datasets, will likely be helpful to C. elegans neuroscientists and theoretical/computational neuroscientists.
   
• Paul Berube, analysis scientist within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Steven Biller, assistant professor of organic sciences at Wellesley College, gained for “Unlocking Marine Microbiomes with Open Data.” Open data of genomes and metagenomes for marine ecosystems, with a concentrate on cyanobacteria, leverage the facility of contemporaneous knowledge from GEOTRACES and different long-standing ocean time-series applications to supply underlying data to reply questions on marine ecosystem operate.
   
• Jack Cavanagh, Sarah Kopper, and Diana Horvath of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) have been acknowledged for J-PAL’s Data Publication Infrastructure, which features a trusted repository of open-access datasets, a devoted group of information curators, and coding instruments and coaching supplies to assist different groups publish knowledge in an environment friendly and moral method.
   
• Jerome Patrick Cruz, graduate pupil within the Department of Political Science, gained for OpenAudit, leveraging advances in pure language processing and machine studying to make knowledge in public audit reviews extra usable for teachers and coverage researchers, in addition to governance practitioners, watchdogs, and reformers. This work was finished in collaboration with colleagues at Ateneo de Manila University within the Philippines.
   
• Undergraduate pupil Daniel Kurlander created a tool for planetary scientists to quickly entry and filter pictures of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The web-based device allows searches by location and different properties, doesn’t require a time-intensive obtain of an enormous dataset, permits evaluation of the info unbiased of the velocity of 1’s laptop, and doesn’t require set up of a fancy set of applications.
   
• Halie Olson, postdoc in BCS, was acknowledged for sharing knowledge from a useful magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on language processing. The examine used video clips from “Sesame Street” through which researchers manipulated the comprehensibility of the speech stream, permitting them to isolate a “language response” within the mind.

• Thomas González Roberts, graduate pupil within the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, gained for the International Telecommunication Union Compliance Assessment Monitor. This device combats the heritage of secrecy in outer area operations by creating human- and machine-readable datasets that succinctly describe the worldwide agreements that govern satellite tv for pc operations.
   
• Melissa Kline Struhl, analysis scientist in BCS, was acknowledged for Children Helping Science, a free, open-source platform for distant research with infants and youngsters that makes it doable for researchers at greater than 100 establishments to conduct reproducible research.
   
• JS Tan, graduate pupil within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, developed the Collective Action in Tech Archive in collaboration with Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya of the University of California at Berkeley. It is an open database of all publicly recorded collective actions taken by staff within the world tech trade. 

A whole listing of profitable tasks and honorable mentions, together with hyperlinks to the analysis knowledge, is accessible on the MIT Libraries website.