This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° Open Science in Education: the Sci-GaIA Winter School and the e-Research Summer Hackfest experiences Prof. Roberto Barbera – University of Catania - Italy 5 September 2016 – Sci-GaIA Workshop on “Open Science in Support of Education” Dar es Salaam (Tanzania)

Outline 2 Introductory concepts, definitions and driving considerations The Sci-GaiA Training & Education courseware The Sci-GaIA Open Science Platform The Sci-GaIA Winter School and the e-Research Summer Hackfest Summary and conclusions

Global “connections”… 3 Challenge: make African science/scientists more «visible» Opportunity: exploit e-Infrastructures to do it Vision: promote Open Science in Africa

Open Science (definitions) 4  “Open Science refers to a scientific culture that is characterized by its openness. Scientists share results almost immediately and with a very wide audience”   “Open science is a means and not an end in itself and it is much more than just open access to publications or data; it includes many aspects and stages of research processes thus enabling full reproducibility and re-usability of scientific results”  OECD (2015), “Making Open Science a Reality”, OECD Science Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 25, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Open Science (enablers) 5 See UNESCO definition of OERs herehere

6 Sci-GaIA is strongly committed to promote Open Science

7 The Sci-GaIA Federated Platform for an Open Science Commons in Africa

Sci-GaIA Courseware Infrastructure 8 A&A ROC courses.sci-gaia.eu Catania SG Framework Other OER’s To be adopted in university curricula in EU and Africa

Sci-GaIA Courseware Infrastructure ( 9

Sci-GaIA Training & Educational Material ( 10

e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for NRENs and Communities of Practice 11 1.Application Integration and Delivery Guides 2.e-Infrastructure Deployment Guides 3.Open Access Repository Deployment and Conf. Guide Code and documentation are available on GitHub under Apache 2.0 license to ensure openness and re-usability Documentation is automatically generated in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, eBook)

Science Gateway development guidelines and materials for NRENs and Communites of Practice 12 1.SG Installation & Configuration 2.SG IDE Installation & Configuration 3.SG IDE Virtual Appliance 4.SG Web Applications’ Dev. Guides

Examples of documentation 13

e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for educational programmes – the “SP Course” 14 Course on how to turn web-based services into Service Providers of Identity Federations Lessons: 1.Shibboleth SP: installation and basic configuration for Single Sign On (SSO) – first part 2.Shibboleth SP: installation and basic configuration for Single Sign On (SSO) – second part 3.Shibboleth SP: advanced configuration 4.The Discovery Service 5.Register a Service Provider in the IDEM federation and in the eduGAIN inter-federation

e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for educational programmes – the “SP Course” 15 Textbook, virtual appliance and video-lessons (on OAR)   Virtual appliance for assignments and hands-ons Slides Video-lessons Each Open Educational Resource has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

e-Infrastructure development guidelines and materials for educational programmes – the “SP Course” 16 Courseware:

The Sci-GaIA Winter School ( 17 Overview The goal of the Sci-GaIA Winter School was to create the skills to integrate scientific applications in the Africa Grid Science Gateway and/or in other domain-specific Science Gateways This contributed to the creation of an intercontinental pool of experts that can act as “interface” between the end-users of the Communities of Practice supported by the project and the e- Infrastructure services The school was entirely web-based and included a combination of pre-recorded lectures and interactive sessions where to check the progress of students through their short presentations and the correction of the exercises The school followed a project-driven education approach with teams of students working on the development of scientific applications to be integrated in the Science Gateway

18 The Sci-GaIA Winter School: the promo video

The Curriculum of the Winter School (See all details at 19 Lessons: 1.Inaugural lesson 2.Course pre-requisites 3.Science Gateway Development Environment 4.Portlet development 5.Portlet User Interface Development 6.Liferay portlet preferences 7.Part 1: The Grid and Cloud Engine, Part 2: Portlet for job submission 8.Portlet for special job submission

20 Textbook (on OAR)Video-lessons (on ) The material of the Winter School (1/2) (See all details at

21 Courseware: The material of the Winter School (2/2) (See all details at

22 Required skills Java programming Web application development (HTML, Java server pages, XML, Application Server, servlets) Basic Unix shell (VPN, SSH, bash scripting) Basic Database management (e.g., MySQL) Selection criteria Relevance of applicants’ CVs to the topics of the Winter School Composition and geographic distribution of the applicants’ team Presence of a proposed scientific application. If a scientific application is proposed, additional criteria will be: Relevance of the proposed scientific application, in terms of its impact and size of the user base Multi-/inter-disciplinarity of the proposed scientific application Societal challenges addressed by the proposed scientific application Use of modern paradigms in the proposed scientific application (e.g., Distributed Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, Open Data, etc.) Readiness status of the proposed scientific application Sci-GaIA Winter School: requirements and selection criteria

23 5 instructors and 27 registered pupils from 12 countries 11 applications, either proposed or assigned 1 online inaugural lesson, 11 checkpoint web-meetings and 1 online final event, for a total of more than 12 hours of direct teaching and tutoring 7 pre-recorded lessons, including exercises, for a total of several hours of teaching time Sci-GaIA Winter School: facts and figures (See all details at

The e-Research Summer Hackfest (See all details at 24 Overview and objectives The e-Research Summer Hackfest was held at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Catania (Italy) in two editions: the first on July, 4-15, 2016 and the second on July, 18-29, 2016 The event was co-sponsored by the Sci-GaIA, INDIGO-DataCloud, and COST ENeL projects The main objective of the event was to integrate scientific use cases through a pervasive adoption of web technologies and standards and make them available to their end users through Science Gateways Promoting and fostering open and reproducible research was the ultimate goal of the hackfest Topics: Big Data analytics Distributed computing services Distributed storage services Programmatic access to Open Data repositories Semantic federation of Open Access repositories User interfaces (web, desktop, mobile, etc.) Workflows Tools and technologies: FutureGateway;FutureGateway gLibrary Kepler Invenio OAI-PMH Onedata Ophidia

e-Infrastructure Service/Tool The e-Research Summer Hackfest approach 25

The e-Research Summer Hackfest: agenda and material (Find everything at 26 Day 1 and 2 Presentation of technologies & tools Day 3 Presentation of the use cases (with indication of the technologies & tools to be adopted) Other days Implementation of the use cases Final day Presentation of final results (with demonstrations) Agenda of 1 st Edition Agenda of 1 st Edition Agenda of 2 nd Edition Agenda of 2 nd Edition Video lectures & tutorials Streamed video recordings Video «moments» Documentary video

The e-Research Summer Hackfest: resources (Find everything at Use cases

28 The e-Research Summer Hackfest: the documentary

29 36 participants from 9 countries: 4 African and 5 European 10 instructors 22 full days of intense work More than 10 hours of professionally edited video lectures and tutorials Almost 20 hours of video streamed and recorded 18 video "moments" with interviews and live feedback from participants 13 use cases: 7 from Africa and 6 from Europe The e-Research Summer Hackfest: facts & figures

The Sci-GaIA “champion” use cases (1/2) 30 1.Development of a National Public Health Gateway to mitigate the effects of motorcycle-related accidents in Kenya (from Egerton University, Kenya) 2.Development of an intelligent Medical Image Analyser: an e- Infrastructure for processing medical images (from Lagos State University, Nigeria) 3.Development of a reproducible Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system (from Northwest University, South Africa) 4.Integration of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) in the Africa Grid Science Gateway to be (primarily) used by the WIMEA-ICT project and exploiting the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at DIT (from DIT, Tanzania, on behalf of the WIMEA-ICT project) 5.Integration of the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks in the Africa Grid Science Gateway (from TERNET, Tanzania)

The Sci-GaIA “champion” use cases (2/2) 31 6.Development a Science Gateway for the iGrid project, which aims at deploying a Smart Grid in rural areas of Tanzania to drive capacity development and enhancement (from University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) 7.Development and deployment of the Collaboration Platform of the Technology Transfer Alliance (TTA), a non-for-profit network of universities interested in: (i) having an impact on development of the societies in which they exist; (ii) problem-oriented, project-driven learning with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship; and (iii) offering students and faculty members opportunities to contribute to important projects for academic credit (from University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) You can see posters and demos of use cases during breaks

Summary and conclusions 32 Open Science is a paradigm shift in carrying out research activities and to be sustainable it must be accompanied by Open Education & Training The Sci-GaIA project is very much committed to foster Open Science and Open Education All training and education materials created within the project are released under very open licenses for maximum reusability The Winter School and the Summer Hackfest have been key to identify very interesting scientific use cases from Africa and to start supporting them until their full implementation If you’re interested in bringing Sci-GaIA educational material in your curricula and/or in joining the group of Sci- GaIA “champions” with your use cases, feel free to contact us at

Thank you! sci-gaia.eu