Presentations by two COKI Project staff have been recognised with Delegates Choice awards at the 2020 eResearch Australasia Online Conference.

 

Senior Data Scientist Dr Rebecca Handcock and Data Trust Scientist Aniek Roelofs both won the awards following their presentations at the October conference.

 

Aniek presented on Dynamic allocation of computational resources using Airflow and Terraform while Rebecca presented on Semi-auto generated reports from a large dataset for non-expert users.

 

Both presentations showcased aspects of work that has been underway on the COKI Project this year and the awards are a welcome recognition of the achievements of the team in continuing to develop one of the world’s leading open knowledge databases.

Aniek outlined the details of her presentation and how she had worked to make it precise and at the same time engaging.

“In my presentation I discussed two tools (Airflow and Terraform) that we are using in our project and showcased how we use both of these together in a demo,” Aniek said.

“It was quite exciting to do the demo live, as it is always a bit risky to have some of the technology failing; but luckily everything went as planned.

“I did have the idea the participants were interested in the talk, but did not expect to receive an award, so it was definitely a nice surprise.”

Rebecca described how she focussed her talk on the users of the more than 12 trillion pieces of information on university research, publications, and funding that are held in the COKI datasets.

“Users often need a summary reports from large datasets but may not have the technical skills to extract it from the cloud-based databases that COKI uses. It was great to show a real example of “literate programming” where tables graphs are mixed with text from the user to semi-auto generate these reports,” Rebecca said

“I was surprised to receive this award, because on the day I had a technical issue and could not share my presentation slides! This is a presented a real challenge, given the conference was entirely online this year.

“Right after my session I made a recording of the presentation and sent it around to the attendees of my session. Everyone was really nice about it; I think because we all worry that it will happen to us!”