Join faculty, students and representatives from the City of Auburn for an event celebrating the start of the inaugural UW Livable City Year, a partnership between the University of Washington and Auburn.

Livable City Year is a cross-university collaboration connecting local governments with University of Washington classes to address community-identified areas of need.  UW students and professors will work with Auburn throughout the upcoming academic year to advance the city’s goals for livability and sustainability.

Speakers will include Jennifer Otten, CSDE Affiliate and assistant professor in the School of Public Health, alongside many others. Faculty members leading Livable City Year courses during Fall Quarter will discuss the projects, followed by a Q&A period.

There will be light refreshments available.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its funding partners in the Grand Challenges family of grant programs are inviting innovators to apply for the following grant opportunities.

Grand Challenges Explorations fosters early-stage discovery research to expand the pipeline of ideas for solving our greatest global health and development challenges. Launched in 2008 with an initial $100 million commitment from the foundation, Grand Challenges Explorations grants have already been awarded to more than 1200 researchers in more than 65 countries.

They are accepting applications on the following four topics until November 9, 2016:

• Assess Family Planning Needs, Preferences and Behaviors to Inform Innovations in Contraceptive Technologies
• Develop Novel Platforms to Accelerate Contraceptive Drug Discovery
• Design New Solutions to Data Integration for Malaria Elimination
• Accelerate Development of New Therapies for Childhood Cryptosporidium Infection

You’re invited to participate in the third Oxford Symposium on Population, Migration, and the Environment. The symposium will be held 5 and 6 December 2016 at St Cross College, Oxford, U.K.

You are welcome to present a paper that encourages the exchange of interdisciplinary ideas about the main themes of the conference: world population increase, human migration, and environmental sustainability.  Alternatively, you may wish to attend as an observer or panel member. Papers presented at the meeting will be subsequently peer-reviewed by external readers for possible inclusion in Symposium Books or sponsored academic journals.

The Symposium seeks to cover a broad agenda that includes disciplines such as economics, education, environmental studies, agriculture, law, political science, religion, and social studies. Topics for presentation may reach beyond these areas, and our website contains an extensive list of suggested topics.

The UW’s Clinical Informatics Research Group is looking for graduate and undergraduate students interested in hourly or RA positions in software development. This is a great opportunity for students to gain experience with open-source software engineering and health informatics. The group designs, develops, and administers clinical, global, population, and consumer health information systems for both research and usual care.

Requirements:

• Demonstrated development experience with PHP or Python, and
  database experience with PostgreSQL or MySQL.
• Comfort working with Linux systems at the command line.
• 10-20 hours / week.

Desired experience:

• Python Flask, CakePHP.
• HTML5, CSS, Javascript.
• Development of consumption of RESTful APIs.
• Mobile dev.
• Health informatics.

For more information, please contact either Justin McReynolds
or Dr. Bill Lober.

The NIH Big Data to Knowledge program is pleased to announce the BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science, a series of online lectures given by experts from across the country covering a range of diverse topics in data science. This course is an introductory overview that assumes no prior knowledge or understanding of data science.

The series starts Friday, September 9th and will run all year once per week at 9:00-10:00 AM PST. No registration is required.

***To join the meeting, view the login information here.
***First GoToMeeting? Try a test session.

This is a joint effort of the BD2K Training Coordinating Center (TCC), the BD2K Centers Coordination Center (BD2KCCC), and the NIH Office of the Associate Director of Data Science. For more information about the series and to see archived presentations, visit the main site.

Schedule
9/9/16: Introduction to big data and the data lifecycle (Mark Musen, Stanford).
9/16/16: SECTION 1: DATA MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW (Bill Hersh, Oregon Health Sciences).
9/23/16: Finding and accessing datasets, Indexing and Identifiers (Lucila Ohno-Machado, UCSD).
9/30/16: Data curation and Version control (Pascale Gaudet, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics).
10/7/16: Ontologies (Michel Dumontier, Stanford).
10/14/16: Provenance(Zachary Ives, Penn).
10/21/16: Metadata standards (Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Oxford).

10/28/16: SECTION 2: DATA REPRESENTATION OVERVIEW (Anita Bandrowski, UCSD).
11/4/16: Databases and data warehouses, Data: structures, types, integrations (Chaitan Baru, NSF).
11/11/16: No lecture — Veteran’s Day.
11/18/16: Social networking data (TBD).
12/2/16: Data wrangling, normalization, preprocessing (Joseph Picone, Temple).
12/9/16: Exploratory Data Analysis (Brian Caffo, Johns Hopkins).
12/16/16 Natural Language Processing (Noemie Elhadad, Columbia).

The following topics will be covered in January through May of 2017:

SECTION 3: COMPUTING OVERVIEW
Workflows/pipelines
Programming and software engineering; API; optimization
Cloud, Parallel, Distributed Computing, and HPC
Commons: lessons learned, current state

SECTION 4: DATA MODELING AND INFERENCE OVERVIEW
Smoothing, Unsupervised Learning/Clustering/Density Estimation
Supervised Learning/prediction/ML, dimensionality reduction
Algorithms, incl. Optimization
Multiple testing, False Discovery rate
Data issues: Bias, Confounding, and Missing data
Causal inference
Data Visualization tools and communication
Modeling Synthesis

SECTION 5: ADDITIONAL TOPICS
Open science
Data sharing (including social obstacles)
Ethical Issues
Extra considerations/limitations for clinical data
Reproducible Research
SUMMARY and NIH context

This fall, in partnership with the Climate Impacts Group, Urban@UW will host a symposium to launch a university-wide engagement with the complex issues of environmental and climate justice in the context of urbanization and city growth and decline.

The event will use the symposium to engage in discussions on how communities are drawing on environmental and climate science to advocate for justice, how human and environmental health are linked in a just city, and how individuals can bring these issues to classrooms and academic communities. More details will be added soon!

For more than 150 years, the University of Washington has been a place where the imagination thrives. New discoveries are made every day in laboratories across campus, where faculty, staff and students work together to tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems. Many of the challenges confronting people today in areas such as climate, disease and health care require fundamental discovery-based research that is novel in its approach and has the ability to break open new territory in a field. The University of Washington Innovation Awards will fuel innovative research that addresses problems of humanity.

Innovation Research Awards seeded through existing gift funds from the President’s office are to support unusually creative early and mid-career faculty in health, natural, social and engineering sciences. Innovative discovery-based individual research or smaller scale collaborative research projects will be supported rather than extensions of large-scale ongoing research programs. The goal is to foster high-payoff work that promises to be transformational but for which other funding sources are limited.

The Innovation Awards will encourage, nurture, bring together, and celebrate creative thinkers in the area. A second purpose of the Innovation Awards is to increase public awareness of academic innovation in hopes of stimulating philanthropic support for additional innovation awards.

Innovation Research awards will be made each year in selected areas that will be rotated each year. For FY 17, awards will be available in the biomedical sciences and in the life sciences. Applications that address any fundamental problem in the biological sciences, including biomedical problems that have clear relevance to human health, are welcome. Applications with a focus on the environmental, engineering or physical sciences will not be considered, as these were the selected area of focus for the FY16 innovation awards. Preference for these awards will be given to Assistant and recently promoted Associate professors. Awards are open to Faculty members from each of the three University of Washington Campuses. Award recipients are expected to publish their results in appropriate journals and give talks on and off campus.

Selection Process

• Innovation Research award criteria: highly innovative, potentially transformational research proposals. Preference will be given to Assistant and Associate Professors.  Research Faculty are eligible to apply.
• Funding: Innovation Research awards will be up to $250K/yr x 2 years.
• Proposal: A two-step process
  • Step 1: Email the following materials as a single PDF to research@uw.edu:
    • Project Summary (1 page maximum)
      • Abstract: Provide an executive summary of this project, including overall goal, methodology and significance for a well-educated lay audience.
      • Unique Aspects: Describe unique or distinctive aspects of this project. How will the project break open new territory in your field? How will it lay the foundation for a solution to a real world problem?
      • Principal Investigator: Provide a brief description of expertise.
    • Project Description (3 page maximum)
      • Overview: Provide an overview of this field and the need for this project.
      • Relevant Efforts: Describe past and current efforts that are relevant to this project.
      • Goals and Methodology: State the major goals of this project and summarize the methodologies and time frame to be used in achieving them.
      • Impact: Describe the potential impacts of achieving these goals. How will results, resources, or best practices be disseminated?
    • 3-page CV citing up to 10 most relevant publications and list of active grants.
    • 1-page description of how your research accomplishments and/ or personal characteristics provide evidence of innovation or creativity.
    • 1 page budget that includes the following budget categories: salaries and wages; benefits; materials and supplies; equipment; travel; contractual services; other services. Indirect costs will not be charged.

Questions should be directed to Matt Orefice, Assistant Director, at research@uw.edu.