Celebrating open data | MIT News

The inaugural MIT Prize for Open Information, which included a $2,500 money prize, was lately awarded to 10 particular person and group analysis initiatives. Introduced collectively by the College of Science and the MIT Libraries, the prize acknowledges MIT-affiliated researchers who make their knowledge overtly accessible and reusable by others. The prize winners and 16 honorable mention recipients had been honored on the Open Information @ MIT occasion held Oct. 28 at Hayden Library. 

“By making knowledge open, researchers create alternatives for novel makes use of of their knowledge and for brand new insights to be gleaned,” says Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries. “Open knowledge accelerates scholarly progress and discovery, advances fairness in scholarly participation, and will increase transparency, replicability, and belief in science.” 

Recognizing shared values

Spearheaded by Bourg and Rebecca Saxe, affiliate dean of the College of Science and John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Mind and Cognitive Sciences, the MIT Prize for Open Information was launched to focus on the worth of open knowledge at MIT and to encourage the following technology of researchers. Nominations had been solicited from throughout the Institute, with a give attention to trainees: analysis technicians, undergraduate or graduate college students, or postdocs.

“By launching an MIT-wide prize and occasion, we aimed to create visibility for the students who create, use, and advocate for open knowledge,” says Saxe. “Highlighting this analysis and creating alternatives for networking would additionally assist open-data advocates throughout campus discover one another.” 

Recognizing researchers who share knowledge was additionally one of many suggestions of the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, which Bourg co-chaired with Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor, Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science. An annual award was one of many methods put forth by the duty drive to additional the Institute’s mission to disseminate the fruits of its analysis and scholarship as extensively as attainable.

Sturdy competitors

Winners and honorable mentions had been chosen from greater than 70 nominees, representing all 5 colleges, the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing, and several other analysis facilities throughout MIT. A committee composed of school, workers, and a graduate scholar made the picks:

• Yunsie Chung, graduate scholar within the Division of Chemical Engineering, received for SolProp, the most important open-source dataset with temperature-dependent solubility values of natural compounds.
   
• Matthew Groh, graduate scholar, MIT Media Lab, accepted on behalf of the group behind the Fitzpatrick 17k dataset, an open dataset consisting of almost 17,000 pictures of pores and skin illness alongside pores and skin illness and pores and skin tone annotations.
   

• Tom Pollard, analysis scientist on the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, accepted on behalf of the PhysioNet group. This data-sharing platform allows hundreds of medical and machine-learning analysis research annually and permits researchers to share delicate sources that will not be attainable via typical knowledge sharing platforms.
   
• Joseph Replogle, graduate scholar with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Analysis, was acknowledged for the Genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset, the most important publicly accessible, single-cell transcriptional dataset collected thus far.
   
• Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, graduate scholar with the MIT Media Lab/Artwork, Tradition, and Expertise, and Diana Duarte, co-founder at Diversa, received for Retos, an open-data platform for detailed documentation and sharing of native improvements from under-resourced settings.
   
• Maanas Sharma, an undergraduate scholar, led States of Emergency, a nationwide challenge analyzing and grading the responses of jail methods to Covid-19 utilizing knowledge scraped from public databases and manually collected knowledge.
   
• Djuna von Maydell, graduate scholar within the Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences, created the first publicly available dataset of single-cell gene expression from postmortem human mind tissue of sufferers who’re carriers of APOE4, the most important Alzheimer’s illness threat gene.
   
• Raechel Walker, graduate researcher within the MIT Media Lab, and her collaborators created a Data Activism Curriculum for highschool college students via the Mayor’s Summer season Youth Employment Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. College students discovered use knowledge science to acknowledge, mitigate, and advocate for people who find themselves disproportionately impacted by systemic inequality.
   
• Suyeol Yun, graduate scholar within the Division of Political Science, was acknowledged for DeepWTO, a challenge creating open knowledge to be used in authorized pure language processing analysis utilizing instances from the World Commerce Group.
   
• Jonathan Zheng, graduate scholar within the Division of Chemical Engineering, received for an open IUPAC dataset for acid dissociation constants, or “pKas,” physicochemical properties that govern how acidic a chemical is in an answer.

A full listing of winners and honorable mentions is offered on the Open Data @ MIT website.

A campus-wide celebration

Awards had been introduced at a celebratory occasion held within the Nexus in Hayden Library throughout International Open Access Week. College of Science Dean Nergis Mavalvala kicked off this system by describing the lengthy and proud historical past of open scholarship at MIT, citing the Institute-wide faculty open access policy and the launch of the open-source digital repository DSpace. “Once I was a graduate scholar, we had been making an attempt to determine share our theses in the course of the days of the nascent web,” she stated, “With DSpace, MIT was figuring it out for us.” 

The centerpiece of this system was a collection of five-minute displays from the prize winners on their analysis. Presenters detailed the methods they created, used, or advocated for open knowledge, and the worth that openness brings to their respective fields. Winner Djuna von Maydell, a graduate scholar in Professor Li-Huei Tsai’s lab who research the genetic causes of neurodegeneration, underscored why it is very important share knowledge, notably knowledge obtained from postmortem human brains. 

“That is knowledge generated from human brains, so each knowledge level stems from a dwelling, respiratory human being, who presumably made this donation within the hope that we might use it to advance information and uncover reality,” von Maydell stated. “To maximise the likelihood of that taking place, now we have to make it accessible to the scientific neighborhood.” 

MIT neighborhood members who wish to study extra about making their analysis knowledge open can seek the advice of MIT Libraries’ Data Services team.