The inaugural MIT Open Data Awards recently awarded 10 individual and group research projects, including $2,500 in cash awards. Presented jointly by the Faculty of Science and the MIT Libraries, the award recognizes MIT-affiliated researchers who make their data publicly accessible and reusable by others.This Winners and 16 Honorable Mention Recipients Honored at the MIT Open Data event in October. 28 at Hayden Library.
“By opening data, researchers create opportunities for new uses of data and for gleaning new insights,” said MIT Librarian Chris Bourg. “Open data accelerates scholarly progress and discovery, promotes equity in scholarly engagement, and increases transparency, reproducibility, and trust in science.”
recognize shared values
Spearheaded by Bourg and Rebecca Saxe, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Science and the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the MIT Open Data Prize was launched to highlight the value of open data at MIT and to encourage A generation of researchers. Nominations are solicited from across the Institute, with a focus on trainees: research technicians, undergraduate or postgraduate students, or postdoctoral fellows.
“By launching MIT-wide awards and events, we aim to create visibility for scholars who create, use and advocate for open data,” Saxe said. “Highlighting this research and creating networking opportunities will also help open data advocates on campus find each other.”
Acknowledging researchers who share data is also one of the committee’s recommendations MIT Research Open Access Ad Hoc Working Group, co-chaired by Bourg and Hal Abelson, Class of 1922, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The annual awards are one of the strategies proposed by the working group to further the Institute’s mission of disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible.
fierce competition
The winners and honorable mentions were selected from more than 70 nominees representing all five schools, the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing, and several MIT research centers.One committee A selection consisting of faculty, staff and graduate students:
- Yunsie Chung, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering Sol propsthe largest open source dataset with temperature-dependent solubility values of organic compounds.
- On behalf of the team, Matthew Groh, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, accepted the Fitzpatrick 17k datasetan open dataset containing nearly 17,000 dermatological images with skin disease and skin color annotations.
- Representative Tom Pollard, Research Scientist, Institute of Medical Engineering and Science physiological network team. This data sharing platform supports thousands of clinical and machine learning studies each year and allows researchers to share sensitive resources not possible through typical data sharing platforms.
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research graduate student Joseph Replogle was recognized for his genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset, the largest publicly available single-cell transcriptional dataset collected to date.
- MIT Media Lab/Arts, Culture, and Technology graduate student Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar and Diana Duarte, co-founder of Diversa, won modifyan open data platform for detailed documentation and sharing of local innovations in under-resourced regions.
- Undergraduate student Maanas Sharma lead state of emergencya nationwide project to analyze and grade the prison system’s response to Covid-19 using data scraped from public databases and manually collected.
- Djuna von Maydell, a graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, created The first publicly available dataset Single-cell gene expression in postmortem human brain tissue from APOE4 carriers, the major Alzheimer’s disease risk gene.
- MIT Media Lab graduate researcher Raechel Walker and her collaborators created a Data Activism Course Assisting high school students through the Mayor’s Summer Youth Employment Program in Cambridge, MA. Students learned how to use data science to identify, mitigate, and advocate for those affected by systemic inequities.
- Suyeol Yun, a graduate student in the Department of Political Science, was honored as Deep WTOa project to create open data for legal natural language processing research using the World Trade Organization case.
- Jonathan Zheng, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Open the IUPAC dataset For the acid dissociation constant, or “pKas”, the physicochemical property that controls how acidic a chemical is in solution.
A full list of winners and honorable mentions is available at Open Data @ MIT website.
School-Wide Celebration
Awards presented during gala event at Hayden Library Nexus International Open Access Week. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the Faculty of Science, kicked off the program by describing MIT’s long and proud history of open fellowship, citing the entire institute’s Faculty Open Access Policy and the launch of DSpace, an open-source digital repository. “When I was a graduate student, we were trying to figure out how to share our papers in the early days of the internet,” she said. “With DSpace, MIT is solving that for us.”
At the heart of the program is a series of five-minute presentations by awardees on their research. Speakers detailed how they create, use, or advocate for open data, and the value open brings to their fields. Laureate Djuna von Maydell, a graduate student studying the genetic causes of neurodegeneration in Professor Li-Huei Tsai’s lab, highlighted why sharing data is important, especially from postmortem human brains.
“This is data generated from the human brain, so each data point comes from a living, breathing person who may have made this donation in the hope that we can use it to advance knowledge and reveal truth,” Feng Mei Del said. “To maximize the likelihood of this happening, we have to make it available to the scientific community.”
Members of the MIT community who would like to learn more about open research data may consult Data Services Team at MIT Libraries.