SnowEx Hackweek 2022
My experiences of organizing a hackweek!
Recently, I started working at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington — Seattle as a Text Mining specialist. Most of my work revolves around providing Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning assistance to UW researchers at various levels.
I was warmly welcomed to the team! Soon after I started working here, I met Anthony Arendt to learn more about the upcoming hackweek that he was organizing — the SnowEx Hackweek. (Hackweeks are participant-driven events that strive to create welcoming spaces for participants to learn new things, build community and gain hands-on experience with collaboration and team science. This particular hackweek was a part of NASA’s SnowEx campaign) I was fascinated by the idea of this particular hackweek. You see, where I come from (Ahmedabad - India), the average temperature during winter is 75°F, so we don’t see any snow around us ever. To be able to see snow, we travel halfway across the country! XD. So, the idea of there being an entire field of study and research built around “Snow” really intrigued me.
I asked Anthony if I could be a part of the hackweek in any way possible and he was more than happy to welcome me to the team! I mostly helped with the organizing of the hackweek and a lot of other tasks that go in and around. This was my first experience organizing an in-person event after two years of having virtual events, where all you need to check on is that you have a good internet connection, and well a nice cup of coffee. To be completely honest, transitioning from a virtual to an in-person set-up was a bit tricky and challenging. There were a lot of things we didn’t take into account. But eventually, we made everything work and had a great week!
During the hackweek
I had never met anyone who pursued Snow Science and here I was in a room full of people with some sort of Snow Science background, if not years of research experience in Snow Science! (Most of them did have years of experience) All of these amazing people started talking about the exciting research they were working on, or some breakthrough they had, and here I was struggling just keeping up with these Snow jargons.
While we were organizing this event, I did not come across any details on what was actually going on with Snow. But, during the hackweek, I learned a lot of details about Snow Science. One of the things that interested me the most was that there is a lot of data available, that is collected manually or otherwise. And most of the people who work with this data are domain experts, with a background in Snow Science. What I saw from my Data Science glasses was the lack of Data Scientists in such a data-rich field.
And you might guess what happened when I saw the data that was available to play with! I went all
So, apart from organizing the hackweek, I decided to participate and work on a project too! (It got a little too hectic to manage the event and work on a project but well, it was a lot of fun)
While most of the teams worked on snow modeling (and a lot of other stuff that I don’t really understand), I wanted to work on Data Science applications with such a variety of data.
Our basic problem statement was to use the SWESAR and the UAVSAR data and combine it with the SnowEx data (that was collected manually at the snowpits) and estimate the radar backscatter. In the longer run, using this estimated back-scatter, calculate the depth of the snow and eventually how much water will be available. The long-term goal of this project was to replace the need for manually collecting the data during such extreme weather conditions with satellites!
We spent a lot of time retrieving the data, understanding the structure of the data, and going through a lot of papers to try and solve the problem. One really cool thing that happened during this was that we were reading a paper and trying to implement the ideas presented in the paper in our project. Since none of us were from a Snow Science background, we were struggling with a lot of things. After working on it and failing to understand it, I realized that one of the authors of the paper (Xiaolan Xu) was a tutorial lead and had presented a tutorial (Signals of Opportunity) the same morning. We reached out to her and asked her if she could help us out and she spent over an hour explaining what the paper was about and how it could be connected to our project. How exciting it is to learn about something from the author!
We attempted to work around a naive approach to get started with the solution to the problem at hand. And will continue to work on the project after the hackweek.
It was exciting to meet new people in person and connect with them! I would especially like to mention folks from my team: Jonas Jans (Project Lead), HP Marshal (Data Science Lead), Aaliyah Hanni, Yiying Gao, Anuhya Bhagavatula, and Samuel Marcus.
I would like to thank Sarah and Anthony for providing me with this opportunity to meet such amazing people! And would also like to thank Anthony, Ann, Jenny, and Louisa for their support throughout the week that I could also participate in the projects!
Lastly, the reason that I wrote this article was to write about my experience with Snow Science from a Data Scientist’s perspective. There is a lot of data that is not yet analyzed and a lot more data is being collected. This field needs Data Scientists and people who could work with this data. There are a lot of resources on the website to help you get started and a lot of the work has already been done. Why not build on it?
And well you get to play with snow XD.
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