Three open source programming languages form a canon of sorts for the emerging field of data science: Python for general computation; Hadoop for managing massive unstructured data; and R for statistical analysis. Funds from this grant support efforts by Karthik Ram, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, to expand and strengthen the R community through the development of products aimed at lowering the barriers to the use of R. Ram has developed an R software module, for instance, that greatly simplifies the process of gathering data from archives and services commonly accessed by scientists, like Dryad, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Ram’s module thus obviates the need for scientists to write their own idiosyncratic code to parse data from such repositories. Grant funds will support the further development of R modules by Ram and his team, as well as outreach efforts to the scientific community to provide training and speed adoption of the new tools.

This project funds an ambitious project by Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, to develop and expand an institutional framework for collaborative scientific work—the Open Science Framework (OSF)—that’s modeled on the open source development protocols that have been so successful in the cooperative development of software. Nosek’s project is based on the insight that scientists could develop much more efficient collaboration practices, saving themselves time and improving the quality and velocity of their work, by borrowing the basic methods and tools of open software development. These include versioning (creating an edit log that tracks changes to any files associated with a project), “tagged releases” (locking a particular, tested version of a project for broader dissemination), “forking” (creating a personal copy of a project to add one’s own edits or additions), and “pull requests” (a request to the owner of a project to merge changes in a “forked” version back into the original). Funded activities include further development of the OSF, the construction of an applications programming interface that would allow the OSF to seamlessly interoperate with other tools and platforms, and collaborations with other developers of scientific cyberinfrastructure.

Since 2009, with support from the Sloan and Hewlett Foundation’s, the Arius Association has been working to promote regional nuclear waste repositories outside of Europe. If such repositories could be brought into existence, they would result in the centralized disposal of dangerous nuclear wastes in a manner that would be more cost-effective, safe, and secure (from both a nonproliferation and dirty bomb perspective) than if each country with a small nuclear power program had responsibility for disposing of its own high-level nuclear waste. Funds from this grant provide support for Arius’ continued work on this issue, including an expansion of the scope of their efforts to include discussion of regional repositories for radioactive wastes from universities, hospitals, and industry. Supported activities over the next two years include a series of workshops in Arab regions and in Asia; the production of a draft constitution and work program for a regional nuclear repository organization; development of an IAEA report on multinational nuclear waste repositories; and a series of high-level papers aimed at specialists and policymakers.