Scholarship for Explorable Research Recipients

Recurring natural events such as West Antarctic ice shelf collapses, the firing of neurons or the rapid population expansions of defoliating insects typically occur neither in a completely periodic nor completely irregular fashion. The cause is the interplay between the noise coming from outside factors interacting with the system in a random or non-predictable way and the rhythm created by the delayed interaction between excitatory and inhibitory components of the system. Stochastic models are mathematical objects which couple rhythm and noise and can express a manifold of possible recurrence patterns.

The FitzHugh-Nagumo model is a versatile yet simple model for the evolution of excitable or oscillatory physical processes. It incorporates a single hidden or latent component, but it can capture a wide spectrum of dynamical processes. Because of its flexibility, this model has been widely used in many scientific fields. There is practical importance to match the free parameters to the real phenomena at hand. The task of statisticians is indeed to fit real data and infer the parameters of the model. In this project we will package a statistical method, provide an interface to visualise and explore the interaction between the parameters and the dynamical patterns created and finally interactively reconnect the inferential results with the natural phenomenon.

Full Application

We are Chicas en Tecnología, an Argentine non-profit organization that since 2015 works to close the gender gap in technology. With our programs and initiatives we motivate, train and support the next generation of women leaders in technology.

We believe that what is not measured cannot be changed and this is why we collected, for the first time in our country, gender data for students of all 80 institutions in all the country, including more than 1700 degrees in STEM, for the last 6 years.

Our goal for our Nextjournal project is to make this information accessible and understandable by journalists, teachers, researchers and the general public. We will combine our dataset with sociodemographic and geographic data, comparing careers by region, year and more. We want to map how universities are distributed across the country, which of them have higher rates of gender diversity and share the strategies that they are applying for achieving them. With the help of this scholarship we will be able to allocate the necessary resources to generate and cross our dataset with others, to discover correlations and outliers and, ultimately, to educate the population in Argentina about how gender diversity in tech is evolving in our country.

Full Application

Our team is formed by professionals and experts in technology, education, entrepreneurship, design and communication who work as permanent staff, consultants and volunteers. We have a dynamic structure that adapts every year to the objectives proposed by our organization. For this project we will form a team of programmers, data scientists and designers to transform all this data into useful information, though text, visualizations and exploration tools.

Biochar is a low-density organic by-product of the thermochemical conversion of biomass that is being evaluated as a soil amendment. Biochar can be used to sequester carbon in soil and also has the potential to boost crop yields when it is used to improve yield-limiting soil properties. These complex interactions have made it challenging to answer the question of where biochar should be applied for the maximum agronomic and economic benefit.

We addressed this challenge by developing an extensive informatics workflow for processing and analyzing crop yield response data as well as a large spatial-scale modeling platform. We used a probabilistic graphical model to study the relationships between soil and biochar variables and predict the probability and magnitude of crop yield response to biochar application.

Our large spatial-scale modeling revealed that 8.4% to 30% of all U.S. cropland can be targeted and is expected to show a positive yield response to biochar application. Expected yield increases of at least 6.1% and 8.8% are necessary to cover 25% and 10% of U.S. cropland with biochar. It was found that biochar application to areas with high probability of crop yield response in the U.S could offset a maximum of 2% of the current global anthropogenic carbon emissions per year.

Finally, in order to better communicate with our audience we will be using Nextjournal to develop interactive tools allowing users with no or little background in computer science to use and take advantage of our data products.

Full Application