NASA's Big Data and the NASA/JPL's Women In Data Boot Camp

I'm playing a game, and it's taking me places. Last Friday it took me to Cross Campus's Pasadena location to check out the NASA/JPL Women in Data Boot Camp.

It was a very interesting day, filled with an incredibly diverse group of presenters, mostly all women, working in data, code, education, engineering, product development and space. You see, this is part of the outreach of the space community, particularly NASA and JPL, to increasing the number of women in the space space. I had an observation that I will save for the end.

The Array of Women

• Beth Beck, Open Innovation Program Manager, NASA
• Dr. Anita Sengupta, Aerospace Engineer, NASA/JPL
  
• Kimberly Bryant, Founder of Black Girls Code
• Dr. Anita Sengupta, NASA/JPL, who worked on the design of Curiosity's parachute
  
• Alex Tosti, co-founder of blink blink
• Nicole Messier, co-founder of blink blink (they met at Parson's school of design).
• Emily Lakdawalla, Senior editor of the Planetary Society
• Kiki Wolfkill, Studio Head, Halo Transmedia and Entertainment, 343 Industries, Microsoft
• Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, Director, Storage Interfaces, Intel
  
• Dr. Kate Stone, Founder, Novalia which works with audio data, sound circuitry and high end mixing software to make playful interactive printed circuits and interfaces.
  
• Michelle Easter, Founder Mind Makers and Mechatronics Engineer at NASA/JPL

Each had a very interesting story. Some had taken the traditional educational route to a space and tech career. Some, less so. Each very open about what makes her different as an individual.

The Big Data

When I think about data from NASA/JPL, the word big comes to mind. BIG, BIG, BIG, humongous, ginormous data.

It's because I'm thinking about all the high-res images they're collecting, statistics being bleeped back to earth periodically, with all those little bits of statistics collected x times per second or minute or - whatever - from all those probes, persons in space suits and science experiments over all those years, missions and exploration thingies in space. My mind is filled with 1's and 0's and I'm floating in space with them all around me. Swimming in data. Big data.

You Might ask "What is Big Data?"

I'm glad you asked, because. I just shared what thoughts sprang into my head, but I didn't know what comes to everyone else's mind when they hear the term. So I looked it up just in case, while wondering how Google does what it does, handling all the oodles and oodles of data. I suppose it's a Secret.

Others have asked the question "What is Big Data?"

Berkeley did a little investigation and got 43 folks in a variety of industries and Big Data to share their thoughts. You can read them here. The responses themselves show a wide range of personal definitions of Big Data. Several of them stood out, but here's a definition from Josh Ferguson that made the most sense to me.

"Big data is the broad name given to challenges and opportunities we have as data about every aspect of our lives becomes available. It’s not just about data though; it also includes the people, processes, and analysis that turn data into meaning."

Josh Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer, Mode Analytics

I suspect that data about every aspect of our lives is going to be voluminous, and it makes sense that voluminous, unchecked data about every aspect of our lives would quickly become too big for the tools that are normally used to process data and would require new processes. Big Data.

From the same report, Seth Grimes talks of Doug Laney who first described the problem in terms of the "three V's".

"Big data has taken a beating in recent years, the accusation being that marketers and analysts have stretched and squeezed the term to cover a multitude of disparate problems, technologies, and products. Yet the core of big data remains what it has been for over a decade, framed by Doug Laney’s 2001 three Vs, Volume, Velocity, and Variety, and indicating data challenges sufficient to justify non-routine computing resources and processing techniques."

Seth Grimes, Principal Consultant, Alta Plana Corporation

Back to the NASA/JPL Big Data

Find it here! https://data.nasa.gov/
What can you do with NASA/JPL's Big Data?

That's what the Space Apps Hackathon was meant to help drive out. The Hackathon provides questions, teams provide the answers. The hackathon was held on the weekend following the boot camp. If you'd like to see the 2015 winners and the challenges for 2016, visit https://2016.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges.

My Last Observation

If you want to be the biggest star in the space community... well... that would be an astronaut. Everyone in the room, including me, wanted to take a photo with astronaut Doug Wheelock, who had great stories about his real-life adventures in space. Not just any astronaut, however, Doug has spent "more than 178 days in space" and encountered emergencies from fixing the space toilet to the station losing power to space-walking to fix the solar array. Doug is a self-described storyteller- a really good one-, and he's got some exciting stories to share.

Photo #1: Squigglemom with Shan Malhotra who works on a system to process high resolution video image data, permitting the users to zoom in and 3d print parts of mapped space bodies.

Photo #2: The presenting team with Astronaut Doug Wheelock.

Trish Tsoi-A-Sue is a creative facilitator in the Long Beach area. Certified in LEGO® Serious Play, she is the President of ETES Inc, and creator of Makersville, a community of makers. Trish is the Ambassador for the Long Beach LEGO® User Group, a group of AFOLs and Teen Fans of LEGO® (TFOLs). Join our facebook group! Some of her random experiences are recorded on her You Tube channel, Squigglemom! Please subscribe! She often writes about LEGO® , her birth country of Trinidad and about Makers and Making things. The concept of finding valuable nuggets of information in randomly collected masses of data is very appealing to her.