Funds from this grant provide three years of continued support for two programs at the City University of New York aimed at supporting faculty and students in STEM disciplines. The first, CUNY's Summer Undergraduate Research Program (C-SURP), provides talented undergraduates with the opportunity to engage in hands-on, in-the-lab research, assisting CUNY science faculty with ongoing research projects during the summer. Grant funds will support 10 students in each of 2015, 2016, and 2017, providing a $4,000 housing allowance and a $4,000 living stipend to each student. The second supported program under this grant is CUNY's Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering (J-FRASE) program, which supports promising early-career STEM faculty at CUNY with a $50,000 fellowship for use in research. Over the course of the next three years, 12 faculty will receive fellowships through this grant.

In 2013, the Foundation approved a one?year grant to rOpenSci, a collective of data scientists, to build and promote a suite of “packages” for R, a powerful programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.  The packages aimed to greatly simplify the process of gathering data from various archives and services commonly used by researchers.  Such software modules dramatically lower the barriers to R use, freeing researchers from having to write their own idiosyncratic code when parsing data from commonly used repositories like Dryad, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This grant provides continued support for this project.  The project team will continue software development, shifting their focus to several generic needs like spatial data analysis and the submission of data to repositories for publication, as well as supporting R interoperability with popular emerging tools for data management like Dat.  To further lower barriers to R use in data-driven research, rOpenSci will also develop openly licensed curricular “modules” that could be incorporated into graduate seminars or informal workshops.  In speed adoption, rOpenSci will cultivate an initial cohort of a dozen “ambassadors” from across the natural and social sciences who will develop domain-specific R packages and lead various outreach and community-building efforts in their home disciplines.

Funds from this grant support efforts by an international team of researchers including Kristin Eschenfelder and Greg Downey of the University of Wisconsin, Madison School of Library and Information Studies and Kalpana Shankar at the University College Dublin School of Information and Library Studies to develop a set of case studies of social science data archives. Beginning with a pilot case study already underway of the University of Michigan’s Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, the team will select a cohort of up to five data archives for study that meet specific criteria, including longevity, collections that are contributed by others, and funding models that do not rely on direct government support.  The researchers will draw on interviews and archival research to develop detailed histories of these archives with a particular focus on how they evolved their current access policies and business models.  The ensuing case studies will help provide a more robust foundation for discussions about how data archives might be made sustainable over the long term.

Raw data needs preparation to be useful for research. In some cases, what is needed is cleanup and normalization; in others, tagging or categorization of dataset elements. Depending on the domain and kind of data, computers can do much of the necessary work, but some tasks, due to fuzziness or complexity in the data, are currently beyond the bounds of computation. Much data prep requires human eyes, human minds, human judgment, and human labor, a daunting demand when the size of many modern scientific datasets is measured in terabytes. The Zooniverse project, an international effort initially based at Oxford University and now housed primarily at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, offers a straightforward solution to this problem: divide the work into very granular tasks, gather a large crowd of science enthusiasts, and let them loose on the data.  The result has been remarkably successful.  Over the past few years the project has launched more than 20 citizen science research projects across meteorology, ecology, astrophysics, history, zoology, pathology, and geology and has attracted more than 1.5 million registered and anonymous users, including a core group of 15,000 dedicated volunteers who contribute at least monthly. Funds from this grant support the next phase in Zooniverse’s evolution:  enabling faster growth to meet the explosive demand for Zooniverse projects.  The Zooniverse team plans to decentralize their governance model, expanding their online platform to allow community volunteers to take part in core management functions while still maintaining peer review and oversight by the research community to ensure that the project’s high scientific standards are met.  The result will be a more self-sustaining and scalable model, which the Adler Planetarium is committed to maintain as a national leader in using citizen science to serve its research and educational missions.