Doctoral candidate Michael Gryk successfully defended his dissertation, "Explorations in Provenance in the Information Sciences," on May 3.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo and Mine Dogucu, professor of statistics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine, have coauthored a chapter in the new book Teaching Accessible Computing. The goal of the book, which is edited by Alannah Oleson, Amy J. Ko and Richard Ladner, is to help educators feel confident in introducing topics related to disability and accessible computing and integrating accessibility into their courses.

With their nearly completed "Whole Tale" project, Bertram Ludäscher, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), and his team have created methods and tools for scientists to link executable computer code, data, and other information to online scholarly publications, which helps ensure reproducibility and paves the way for new discoveries.

The work of an iSchool team led by Visiting Research Scientist Chris Havlin and Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is at the center of a National Science Foundation (NSF) project to better understand the microphysical activities of rocks that affect the upper mantle of the Earth.

Randomized clinical trials are valuable in determining the effectiveness of health treatments. But problems with design, execution or reporting of the trial process can lead to unreliable findings, excessive costs, and, potentially, harm for patients. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and his colleagues seek to address this problem with the help of a $1,328,502 grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $54,000 grant from RStudio, PBC to make its open-source scientific and technical publishing system Quarto more accessible. For his project, "Improving Accessible Reproducibility for Data Science Publishing System," he will collaborate with RStudio, PBC to develop and improve accessibility components of Quarto for people with and without dis/abilities.

iSchool researchers have co-organized a highly interactive workshop on traceable, transparent, and trustworthy research as part of ProvenanceWeek 2021. The T7 Workshop: Provenance for Transparent Research aims to engage attendees in a focused conversation about how methods for automated provenance capture, storage, query, inference, and visualization can make research more transparent and the trustworthiness of results easier to evaluate, both by other researchers and the public. The free workshop will be held on July 22 from 9:00 a.m.-12:45 p.m. CT.

Peer review is a valuable component in the research process, but it also lengthens the time to publish research. The need to rapidly communicate scientific findings has been especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an increase in the number of publications disseminated via preprint servers. With the lack of traditional peer review, the quality of these publications can be questionable. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and the Automated Screening Working Group are working to assess COVID-19 preprints for rigor and transparency in their reporting.

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher will be the keynote speaker for a webinar hosted by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on February 10. The webinar, "Toward Open, Reproducible, and Reusable Research," will present projects, approaches, and practices that advance research sharing for reproducibility and reuse.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been invited to guest edit a special theme issue of the Harvard Data Science Review dedicated to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on Reproducibility and Replication in Science. The Harvard Data Science Review, an open access platform of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, has a primary emphasis on reproducibility, replicability, and readability, along with broad Data Science topics.

The use of data science tools in research across campuses has exploded–from engineering and science to the humanities and social sciences. But there is no established data science discipline and no recognized way for various academic fields to develop and integrate accepted data science processes into research. Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has proposed a framework for guiding researchers and curriculum development in data science and for aiding policy and funding decisions. She outlines the approach in the journal Communications of the ACM.

Doctoral candidate Craig Willis successfully defended his dissertation, "Trust, But Verify: An Investigation of Methods of Verification and Dissemination of Computational Research Artifacts for Transparency and Reproducibility," on June 16.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, "Opportunities for Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Realizing the Potential of Advanced and Automated Workflows," which was held virtually on March 16-17. 

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present her reproducibility research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, which is billed as the world's largest general scientific gathering. The 2020 meeting, with the theme "Envisioning Tomorrow’s Earth," will take place on February 13-16 in Seattle, Washington.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present the webcast, "Community Efforts Advancing Reproducibility and Transparency in Data- and Computationally-Enabled Research," on February 7. Her talk is part of a nine-week series of webcasts hosted by Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research), in which leaders in research transparency discuss their latest thinking on how to make statistical research open, reproducible, and credible. Registration for the webcast, which will take place at 12:00 p.m., is free but required to access the live stream.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will give distinguished lectures at the University of Chicago on November 19 and Northwestern University on November 20. These lectures will focus on her reproducibility research as well as her work as a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Associate Professor Victoria Stodden a two-year, $300,000 grant to facilitate research on scientific reproducibility. Her project, "Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science," seeks to improve understanding of how the scientific community can adapt to the increasing use of computing and large-scale data resources. Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by an NSF Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER).

iSchool researchers will present their work at the Workshop on Research Objects 2019 (ro2019), which will be held in conjunction with eScience 2019 on September 24-27 in San Diego, California. The Research Objects approach proposes a way to "package, describe, publish, archive, explore, and understand digital research outputs by reusing existing Web standards and formats." Workshop participants will explore recent advances and challenges remaining to increase Research Object uptake among data providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research on reproducibility at the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Conference, "Building Bridges Across the S&T Enterprise," which was held on June 13-14 at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The conference brought together science and technology (S&T) leaders to share best practices and build collaboration across the Federal S&T enterprise.