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Fulbright Application Essays |
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Project/workshop purpose (2,500 characters): project objectives, background on issues, essence of workshop
SEAMS will introduce students to challenges that arise when developing and publishing software for scientific research, as well as best practices and tools to overcome those challenges.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a pan-African organization that recruits and trains African university graduates in the mathematical sciences, with a long-term goal of catalyzing African development. We believe that providing African men and women with high-quality mathematical training and mentoring in research and innovation will strengthen Africa as a whole, better equipping its people to fight the multidimensional causes of under-development, such as infectious disease.
AIMS' core program is a 9-month Masters degree comprising a 3-term sequence: foundational coursework, intensive electives, and independent research culminating in a thesis defense. Instruction is provided by local African researchers and faculty from prominent institutions worldwide, including many in the US. We emphasize applying mathematics and mathematical thinking to Africa's development challenges. That emphasis often entails computational approaches to these challenges.
Thus, our curriculum includes multiple courses in programming, and some students’ thesis projects are primarily computation-focused. For students drawn to more computational work--for example, modeling complex public health challenges such as the Ebola crisis facing West Africa--this basic coursework and initial research form a solid foundation. However, we do not have time in the core AIMS curriculum to build on that foundation with focused training on advanced research-oriented software development.
SEAMS will address this gap by enhancing students' capacity to undertake research projects with a significant programming component. Students will either continue their thesis research or develop new projects based on local needs suggested by the workshop organizers. We expect that the workshop will lead to products that are both useful to Africans and publishable either in academic settings or as open source online tools. We will also provide an opportunity for students to obtain expert training on the practices and tools used in complex research software projects, preparing them to engage in international collaborations in academia (e.g., future work with the Square Kilometer Array) and industry (e.g., big data technology companies like Google), or to further their academic studies.
Project/workshop description (2,500 characters): type and scope of work that specialists would engage in (specific activities they would be doing, the extent and level of activities and who activities would benefit)
The Software Engineering for Applied Mathematics and Sciences (SEAMS) workshop will provide expert coaching for advanced African mathematics students, so that they can gain experience in the practices and tools used by international technical collaborations while refining their research projects to provide broadly accessible, reusable results.
We request specialists that can:
- Directly mentor students’ research-oriented programming.
- Prepare and lead interactive sessions on developing research software, including practical exercises to accompany those sessions. Example topics include organizing analysis pipelines, handling big data, developing test suites to verify and validate research code, leveraging open source software, and distributing research code via open access platforms. Instructional materials must also be organized into an open-source, globally accessible repository, for reference by the students and to facilitate future workshops.
- Review project opportunities leading up to the workshop to prepare appropriate ‘focus sessions’ on specialized topics. Example topics include using numerical methods libraries for partial differential equations, integrating analyses with geographic information systems, and using bioinformatics tools.
- Work with local senior personnel to integrate them into the workshop program, with the goal of developing local expertise that will be available throughout the AIMS academic year and support for on-site coordination in the future.
- Continue to collaborate with students, AIMS researchers, and African researchers contributing project proposals after the workshop leading to publication of the work started at the workshop, or coordinate introductions to other collaborators willing to take on this role.
The principal beneficiaries are the students, who will improve and broaden their skillsets and, in some cases, add their work to the body of global research knowledge and tools. Local AIMS personnel will also improve their skills as part of the workshop, and may contribute as co-authors on student publications. AIMS as a whole will benefit with the publication of high-quality, complex technical work that raises the organizational profile and helps to attract the best possible students and proposals from African researchers. Finally, because many student projects focus on African development, improving the quality and impact of their work is anticipated to increase local community benefits.
Workshop Impact on Host Institution (2,500 characters)
AIMS-Ghana thrives by having a vibrant, enabling environment for high-quality mathematical sciences research. We supplement our core program with academic events. We have a regular seminar series on research focused on Africa’s development needs, which promotes the sharing of ideas between students and more established researchers. We plan to host the annual Edward Bouchet / Abdus-Salam Regional Workshop on Differential Equations and Analysis, previously hosted by the University of Ghana. While we plan to add other events, we do not yet have support for one focusing on computing and software engineering issues. The SEAMS workshop will fill this gap.
The ability to host such workshops is driven by AIMS’ reputation, and that reputation is built by the accomplishments of the individuals who participate in its programs. The more high-quality work AIMS students and researchers publish, especially while participating in AIMS-based activities, the more that reputation grows, and the better faculty, students, and research proposals the institute will attract.
Because the SEAMS workshop is focused on producing tangible software products from research done at AIMS, this serves to both enrich our people intellectually as well as to get their work published. We anticipate that at least a few projects will eventually lead to publicly available products, such as software modules for open source languages like R or Python, or Web-based applications making the research accessible to policy-makers. These results will show that AIMS is an organization that produces innovative, open research that is clearly communicated and easily replicable and extended, that we are devoted to broad advancement of the African continent, and that our program can help students and researchers develop meaningful skills.
Including this workshop makes AIMS a better partner to the African researchers that propose student work, since they can expect that the research products will be packaged in a more organized, portable, and robust form, ready to apply to other work or future endeavors. It may also encourage more diverse proposals, as researchers encounter products that they might not have necessarily linked to mathematical research.
Project Potential for Institutional Linkages (2,500 characters): for developing linkages between AIMS-Ghana and grantee's home institution....can be plans to expand and build on; new projects, mutual exchange of students/faculty; future collaborations on publications, etc between the institutions...
We anticipate the specialists will be naturally enthusiastic about our students’ research, and fully support them collaborating on that research with the students, AIMS faculty, and African researchers that proposed it. We expect these collaborations, catalyzed by the workshop, will develop into products that will benefit Africa and the world.
Because the specialists come from US universities or industry, we anticipate they will be aware of mutually beneficial links to be made between our students and their home institutions, and that the workshop will provide a first step toward forming those collaborations. The specialists may also be able to establish ties between AIMS and their home institution for sharing computational resources, such as supercomputer time.
Because of AIMS’ close connection to local researchers, we may also be able to bridge connections not only between those researchers and the individual specialists involved in the workshop but also with the wider research community at the specialists’ home institutions. These connections could certainly produce long-distance theory-based collaborations, which is our focus, but we also anticipate ample opportunity for forming partnerships to conduct field research. We have especially strong ties to the math departments in the three major Ghanaian universities: University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast, and KNUST.
Since we run our core program in collaboration with international scholars, we hope the specialists for this workshop can also introduce our program to others at their home institutions, so that they might contribute to our Masters program. We also host international teaching assistants for the program, and the specialists could advertise this opportunity to current US graduate students. This opportunity also extends beyond AIMS-Ghana, since we are a member of a broader AIMS network, and the specialists would be able to let people know about the opportunities at our sites across Africa.
Though we are piloting the course with only our students, other AIMS sites have similar style workshops on different topics that invite US students to participate and form long term collaborations with their African peers (e.g., the NIH-sponsored Clinic on the Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data workshop that is held annually at AIMS South Africa). We hope to expand our program similarly after demonstrating its effectiveness.