End of project notes and reflections

[malvikasharan]

Hand-over meeting

• Date: 8 April 2022
• Attendees: Malvika, Fede, Lydia

Status

• The first drafts ofr both training materials have been shared with everyone on the project
• Review and illustration sprint on 28-29 April, details for which are shared here: https://forms.gle/fXPZ9yPzMkqMxrdQ8.
• Turing Podcast recording on 29 April - with Ed Chalstry
• The project is still in progress, we need to add examples and case studies from following sections: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/data-training-for-bioscience/blob/main/proposal/2022-01-18-follow-up.md#overview-masterclasses <-- inviting contributions from Arron Lacey and RAM, + all the sprint attendees
• Lydia will ve creating issues mentioning gaps and enhancements so people during the sprint can work more effectively: defining some tasks and assigning to right people

What could have been better?

• A clear target from the beginning could have really constructive. We started with a proposal with different target audience that changed immediately after the project started. The fact that the project was not written collaboratively, our perception of what we wanted to deliver vs what the Crick researchers needed were very different.
  • We were not clear what is the final goal with this strategic partnership is and how this project advancees that, as well as the initial project proposal which was used to find REG allocation was completely changed (the reason Fede was involved is that we had suggested them to reuse RDS and Humanities data science materials. Since they were aimed at ECRs, none of those proposal was valid anymore.)
• This project could benefit from more collaboration from the Crick, and in retrospective the proposal should have been built with the Crick. During the project their involvement could have been helpful in the biweekly check-ins.
• This project could have been better delivered if at least 2 people from REG were allocated. REG have mandated now that every project need to have at least 1 full time, or 2 half time members from their team.

Specific recommendation for the partnership

• Recommending our partner institure to find funding to carry forward these materials and get them delivered
• It was great to have Alisha involved to help us build concrete timeline and follow up plans, and thanks to Rebecca for getting some requests clarified
• In the context of ECR training materials (as shared with us during the development) the Crick can connect with following teams to update some training material: training and skills team, The Carpentries, RDS course by REG, DSG programme

Update to send to everyone in this partnership

TL, DR: Sharing the first draft of the training materials developed in this project. Next, we are organising a review and illustration sprint (28-29 April) - please sign up and/or share this with others who we should involve in the project to review and enhance these materials.

In this email, I am sharing updates and the next steps for your engagement in the Turing-Crick Partnership project: Introduction to Data Science for Biomedical Scientists. (all emails from original email thread is included)

First drafts:
During the last months, we have developed the first drafts of two training materials designed for senior researchers:

• Managing Open and Reproducible Computational Projects: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/managing-computational-projects/
• Introduction to Data Science and AI for senior researchers: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/data-science-ai-senior-researchers/

These are very much a work in progress, especially since several of our contributors are still working on enhancing the content of the data science and AI lesson by curating examples from research at the Turing, and more widely in biomedical/biosciences collected through our 1:1 interviews.

What’s next?
Please join us at the upcoming review and illustration sprint on 28-29 April, details for which are shared here: https://forms.gle/fXPZ9yPzMkqMxrdQ8. You can flexibly choose to attend 1-2 sessions (2 hours each) online and contribute to any part of the materials that you would like to help improve for practical use.

Please also share this opportunity with anyone and let me know who else should I reach out to invite at this sprint. This will be a great chance to get more experts from the Crick involved in reviewing the content, examples and case studies, as well as create illustrations with a professional scribe/artist at the event to help communicate complex concepts in simple illustrations. Our goal is to engage them in building something that they would like to use to advance data science practices at the Crick.

I will be meeting Rebecca Wilson next week to identify who at the Crick will be taking on the workshop/training delivery responsibilities after the sprint. Please let me and/or Rebecca know if you would like to join us at this meeting.

Overview of the project so far:

The official funding period for this project ended last week. Here, I am also sharing a brief overview of the project:

• Supported by The Alan Turing Institute - AI for Science and Government (ASG) Research Programme, this project officially started in October 2021 to engage researchers at the Turing and Crick in two stages:
  • October – December 2021: During this period we brought together researchers from the Turing and Crick in identifying the gaps in data skills that we can address with this project.
  • January – March 2022: During this period, we developed the first drafts of two sets of training materials.
    In February 2022, we also held 1:1 with 5 senior researchers at the Crick and several Turing researchers and Fellows to draw case studies, examples and real-world applications of AI technologies from their areas of research.
• This project funded 0.5 FTE of one member Lydia France, a data scientist at the Turing with bio-computation background, who worked under the supervision and guidance of Federico Nanni, Alisha Davies and me.
• We will release the first version of the materials after the review sprint in May 2022 to allow interested members to run pilot workshops at the Crick and more widely in other research organisations (see this for reference).

You can find all project-related documents including proposal, timeline, meeting notes and project reports here: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/data-training-for-bioscience/. Please let me know if further information might be helpful.