Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
10 - 13 June 2019
13 June 2019
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
40
Scott Collis, Giri Prakash, Mariko Oue, William Gustafson, Joseph Hardin
Breakout Description
ARM and ASR have a diverse pool of stakeholders, PIs, and scientists working in the service of science. Each day these scientists carry out a largely common set of tasks — for example, looking at data quality, making plots, performing retrievals, running simulations, and making inferences. Occasionally an essential idea for one group is sitting within unreleased code at another institution. A key way of facilitating knowledge transfer is through Open Science, which can be broken down into six components: open-source code, open data, open educational resources, open access, open methodology, and open peer review. This session will focus on the first three. The main goals of the session are:
- Answering the question, "what is open science?"
- Capturing the state of open-source projects and open science efforts across CESD
- Give scientists working on tools the opportunity to inform attendees as to the tool's availability
- Highlighting ARM and ASR efforts in open data
- Identifying key areas for future development across science and infrastructure
- Soliciting audience feedback on activities that could accelerate science in CESD through workshops, short courses (e.g., AGU/AMS), and new capabilities in ARM
This session will be half presentation based and half open discussion with the deliverable being a session report capturing the state of open science in CESD and suggestions for future directions.
Main Discussion
Scott Collis opened proceedings with a framing discussion and highlighted why he gets personal and professional satisfaction from Open Science.
Giri Prakash gave a short and very well received presentation on the FIND framework for good open data.
Bill Gustafson gave a presentation on thoughts and challenges in getting parts of LASSO into the public domain.
Mariko Oue gave a presentation on the open-source CR-SIM radar simulator highlighting several use cases. Mariko highlighted plans to frequently communicate with users to improve CR-SIM and better organize the packages.
Joseph Hardin presented how an open-source library (PyDSD) was transitioned to an ARM VAP (PARSQUANTS).
Peter Marinescu presented on the open-source tracking software TOBAC, which is supporting ACPC (and other) efforts.
Key Findings
Licencing remains a key and fraught area of publishing open-source software from within the laboratory system. The act of making submissions to existing community packages can be a gray area in terms of intellectual property and who owns it (The lab, DOE, or the individual).An issue was raised that, when multiple frameworks exist (for instance in cell/object tracking) choosing which one to use can be very difficult.
There was some discussion on if a “clearing house” that catalogs all CESD-funded software would help users and program managers. It would be good if this could be a system that promotes the software beyond the CESD community. It was raised that OSTI might fill this need.