FUNding Friday Projects

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

FUNding Friday is an annual mini-competition established in 2008 at the Summer Meeting in Durham, NH. Several $5,000 awards are given to members to fund small projects that are inspired by ESIP collaboration or participation. In 2009, the ESIP Federation created a student competition with awards of $3,000.

This competition serves several purposes:

  • promotes and rewards new collaborations or bridges between ESIP projects and technologies, so that novel outcomes can be explored.
  • fosters small-scale projects of real value by supporting programmer salary, travel—whatever is needed to realize the proposed work.
  • showcases how the ESIP Federation can leverage current technologies and member skills to add new services with a modest amount of effort(and funding).
  • rewards members who are looking to explore new collaborations and new ideas inspired by other Federation member activities.

See Rules for details on voting and eligibility.

2023 Winners

Project Owners Poster Funding Cycle
Elizabeth Adams Poster Summer 2023
Eli Holmes Poster Summer 2023
Wade Bishop Poster Summer 2023
Sruti Modekurty Poster Summer 2023
Lisa Kihn Poster Summer 2023
Vicky Gorman Poster Summer 2023

2022 Winners

Project Owners Poster Funding Cycle
Chris Simoniello Poster Summer 2022
Brian Callahan Poster Summer 2022
Karen Moe Poster Summer 2022
Qian Huang Poster Summer 2022
Karie Suhajda Poster Summer 2022
Amruta Kale Poster Summer 2022
Samantha Child Poster Summer 2022

2021 Winners

Project Owners Poster Funding Cycle
Ryan McGranaghan
Space Weather? In ESIP? Why?
Summer 2021
Thilanka Munasinghe
Identifying Vulnerable Facilities to to the Extreme Effects of Precipitation
Summer 2021
Megan Raisle
Can we combine databases to get better info?
Summer 2021
Eric Walters
Student-led conference for high school students and educators worldwide.
Summer 2021
Jessica Elliott
Multiple Point-of-Interest Walk
Summer 2021
Rebecca Walters
Citizen Science School Garden and Community Arboretum
Summer 2021
Mimi Walker
Wildfires
Summer 2021

2020 Winners

Project Owners Title Poster Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Amber Budden (DataONE/NCEAS), Daniella Lowenberg (CDL), Shelley Stall (AGU), Denise Hills (GSA), Erin McLean (Arctic Data Center), Rob Crystal Ornelas (ESS-DIVE), Kristin Vanderbilt (EDI) Why is this so hard? File:BUDDEN.pdf URL Summer 2020
Robert Rovetto Semantic Orbital Sweep File:ROVETTO.pdf URL Summer 2020
Sarah Ramdeen Deep Time Climate Data File:RAMDEEN.pdf URL Summer 2020
Alexis Garretson Columba File:GARRITSON.pdf URL Summer 2020
Jake Hinz SOS Explorer File:HINZ.pdf URL Summer 2020
Steven Martell Drone Data for Schools File:MARTELL.pdf URL Summer 2020

2019 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Yuhan Rao, Anne Wilson, Nancy Hoebelheinrich Tutorials: Introducing Machine Learning URL Summer 2019
Ted Habermann Identifying ESIP Connections URL Summer 2019
Chao Ma, Marshall Ma Deep Time Climate Data URL Summer 2019
Ben Roberts-Pierel, Ellie Davis Bill-ding Bridges: Data informing policy URL Summer 2019
Rose Borden, Katy Rico Developing a Series of Flexible Modules for Community College Earth Science Students URL Summer 2019
Marguerite Walker Dive Into Data URL Summer 2019

2018 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
James Gallagher , Bob Simmons Harvesting User Knowledge URL Summer 2018
Keith Maull, Ben Galewsky, Sean Gordon A Searchable Repository of Notebook Metadata URL Summer 2018
Shayna Skolnik Are you a climate warrior? URL Summer 2018
Connor Scully-Allison Automatic Database & Microservice Generation from Structured Ontologies URL Summer 2018
Ranalda Tsosie How's your H2O URL Summer 2018
Patrick Chandler Now Hear This: An Audible Data Experience URL Summer 2018

2017 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Ruth Duerr, Reid Boehm A 20-year Surprise URL Summer 2017
Beth Huffer Earth Science Idol URL Summer 2017
Ryan Bowe, Gary Motz Photogrammetric Metadata URL Summer 2017
Matt Bartos Automated Sensor Firmware URL Summer 2017
Lori Baker Data, Drones & Great American Eclipse URL Summer 2017
Deborah Gaff Collecting Data that Matters - Physical Computing URL Summer 2017

2016 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Sean Gordon Making Metadata Easy with Geonetwork URL Summer 2016
Kate Young, Janine Aquino Pimp My Drone URL Summer 2016
Denise Hills, Kim Hines, Steve Diggs, Ismael Simley Questionable Community Continuity URL Summer 2016
Sam Silva (Student Award) Understanding Vegetation Through Social Media URL Summer 2016
Ed Flathers (Student Award) Meanwhile, in dataland URL Summer 2016
Tammy Glover (Teacher Award) Can we do... Sustainable? URL Summer 2016
Kalo Haslem (Teacher Award) The use of STEM and Drones in the Middle School Classroom to Assist Student Learning URL Summer 2016

2015 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Sean Barberie (student award) HumanHAB HumanHAB is an exploratory project to explore what data sets and statistical indicators may better represent the nuanced impressions that people have about these complicated human habitats. Some potential indicators that will be explored are: walkability and public transit, local-businesses versus chains, and correlation exceptions... This project is highly exploratory, and the methods and relevant indicators will change and develop with the project. Deferred till Summer 2016 Summer 2015
Brandon Whitehead (student award) Semantic models for the ESIP community ...Semantic matching of orthogonal facets of the ESIP community could provide some semblance of an enhanced search (and perhaps visualization component) along with an understanding of where the community has been (conceptually) versus where it may be going. More broadly, the proposal aims to capture the emergent structures, patterns, or clusters of information prevalent in within the community. Deferred till Summer 2016 Summer 2015
Sarah Ramdeen (student award) Stewardship of physical data, Use case and community engagement ESIP supports a wide variety of work related to earth science information. One prominent group within ESIP is the Data Stewardship Committee... Given the overwhelming activities the Data Stewardship Committee is working on, there is a need to explore an ESIP cluster to focus on this narrow subset and to act as a leader among this community. The project will develop a use case describing the existing issues related to stewardship of physical data and work on building connections between these diverse communities. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/8771 Summer 2015
Sophie Hou (student award) Roadmap for the Next Generation Data Management Training Modules From 2011-2103, ESIP partnered with NOAA and the Data Conservancy to produce the current version of the “ESIP Data Management for Scientists Short Course”. To understand the current needs for data management training and to build effective training resources, the Committee would like to assess the current landscape Data Management Training (DMT) resources. This project will contribute to the Committee’s roadmap as well as determining potential collaborators for the ESIP Short Course. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/8763 Summer 2015
Soren Scott (full award) A Github Badging System Github badges provide a quick and visual way to indicate build status, code coverage or participation in crowdfunding opportunities. There is a desire in the ESIP community to acknowledge participation in ESIP collaborations without requiring (or creating the expectation) that a project repository be hosted under the ESIP Federation Github organization... This project proposes a system of badges that can be included in a project’s README documentation as a simple branding activity. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/8760 Summer 2015
Wade Bishop (full award) Harvesting Information Partnerships for Geospatial data Education and Outreach (HIPGEO) The HIPGEO project will create a potential partner directory to grow ESIP institutional membership. This list combined with existing members also provides a useful sampling frame for job analyses to inform the earth data science curriculum. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/8969 Summer 2015
Shelley E. Olds (full award) Interactive Interface To Explore Natural Hazards And Vulnerability In Coastal Communities Along the coast of the Pacific Northwest a massive earthquake could occur at anytime. Residents and visitors often aren’t familiar with how to prepare or respond. In this project, an interactive map will provide an interface to explore hazards and vulnerability data available for the coastal Pacific Northwest. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/8815 Summer 2015

2014 Winners

Project Owners Title Summary Winter Meeting Poster Node Funding Cycle
Bruce Caron, Adam Shepherd Working Group Syndicated Content Tool Similarly focused working groups across organizations such as ESIP, Research Data Alliance (RDA) and EarthCube (EC) could share content from their respective online website workspaces through a syndicated RSS feed for display on the other related working group websites. Coincidentally, all of these sites run on the Drupal platform, for which, the EOSDIS group developed code, or Drupal module, that syndicates content across multiuple Drupal sites – the Earth Data Federated Content Tool (ED-FCT). TBD Summer 2014
Kaijian Xu Rich Semantic Annotation for Science Media Repositories This project provides a new framework for a highly expressive, descriptive annotation of multimedia content like images, video, etc. in scientific repositories, using a language structure that is inspired by word classes (e.g. nouns, verbs, etc.) in everyday (“natural”) languages. Such a framework would be used to capture and represent rich, semantic annotations about what objects and features are present within the scene, the interactions between them, as well as further describe such objects and interactions. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7864 Summer 2014
Kelly Monteleone Converting mb-system Files in Windows and Apple Mb-system is a unix based program for multibeam sonar (Bathymetry) data. Mb-system was supported by NOAA from 2002 to 2004. It does not work in windows and is complicated to install and use. Goal: Create a one click installer that will install Cygwin, mb-system, and supporting files on a windows system. And pull out a python wrapper for Apple and non-cygwin installation. This will provide a GUI to export the data in xyz, ascii, and GeoTIFF. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7760 Summer 2014
Kevin Dobbs Leveraging the Power of Google Earth Engine to Derive High Quality Water Reference Data for Flood Disaster Decision Support At the 2014 Summer ESIP meeting a poster was created and presented based on the idea that American emergency response agencies can utilize aquaponics systems after a disaster event has occurred in any region. It is imperative that the aquaponics systems be suited for the region based on climate and population and that the people of the area are taught how to use and maintain the systems. Through the use of technologies such as Esri ArcMap, Worldview, iRODS, ect. geospatial data from a variety of DAACs will be used to pre-plan for a case study on a particular region. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7871 Summer 2014
Kyle Nelson Enhancing and Educating with the WxSat Mobile App At the 2014 Summer ESIP meeting a poster was designed and presented to promote the idea of building upon the successful WxSat app (iOS and Android) that allows users to view global visible, infrared and water vapor satellite data on mobile devices. Current products are viewable in black and white but color enhanced imagery can allow for ease of identification of key weather features. Satellite imagery is becoming more prevalent with ease of access online and is being displayed increasingly often on local and national weather segments. To enhance the understanding of the all who view satellite data, an educational tutorial will be created with case studies for all three imagery types. Meteorological phenomena will be identified through annotated still and animated images to provide a conceptual model for the user to apply when viewing satellite imagery in real time via the WxSat app or another source. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7860 Summer 2014
Lee Hyokyung HDFCRAFT – Making Earth Data Fun! At the 2014 Summer ESIP meeting a poster was created and presented based on the idea that NASA HDF/HDF-EOS data products can be used for Minecraft game. Minecraft stores its world maps in Anvil file format that has similar characteristics that HDF has. By converting NASA HDF data into Minecraft map, kids and educators can play with NASA Earth Data easily in 3D. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7742 Summer 2014
Matt Ferrito ToolMatch Extension The ToolMatch project was based upon the idea of semantic matching of data collections and tools that could be used with those data collections. Specifically, two use cases were developed for the service: 1. Search for the tools that can be used with a given data collection, and then find out what the tool can do with the data collection. 2. Search for collections that can be used with their tool, and capture information about what the data user would like to be able to do with their data. The poster created and presented at the 2014 ESIP Summer Meeting was based upon the idea of an extension of the second use case. This extension involves the semantic matching of data collection content with applicable tools. This matching is stricter than than matching based upon information about the data collection, but the use case itself is broader in scope. Ex: Given rainfall or topology measurements, determine which tools within a hyrdologoical model can be used with the data content. This will allow the appropriate tools within the model to be used with the matching data collection content. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/7735 Summer 2014
Linyun Fu & Massimo Di Stephano Towards Automatic Provenance Capturing for Research Publications Provenance information is critical for research publication readers to correctly interpret report content and enables them to evaluate the report by digging into the software in use, source data and responsible agents. However, creating proper provenance information for research publications is very hard. We propose a project to develop a platform that can automatically capture provenance information in the process of preparing publications. The idea is that authors just need to do their regular authoring jobs on the platform without caring about provenance, which is captured by the library functions of the platform in an non-distracting manner. http://commons.esipfed.org/node/9137 Summer 2014

2013 Winners

Member Winners

Student Winners

Other FUNding Friday-inspired projects:
CheapStix: Distributing and Running OPeNDAP servers on a Virtual Machine
1-Click Satellite Data: A Java applet that let's you display current satellite data anywhere in the world with one simple mouse click.

2012 Winners

Member Winners

Student Winners

2011 Winners

Member Winners

Student Winners

2010 Winners

Member Winners

Student Winners

2009 Winners

Member Winners

Student Winners

2008 Winners