SPICE Summer Data Science Institute Peppered with Data

SPICE 2023 ran from June 2-30th and welcomed 30 student participants including 22 undergraduate students from Hawaii (19 from Chaminade University). The remaining eight undergraduates hail from the Northern Marianas College (5), Mount Mercy University in Iowa, University of Portland and Guam Community College. Five undergraduate student mentors also were involved. “The underlying theme of SPICE is about building capacity and learning communities in the Pacific to harness the power of technology and data to address challenges,” Allianec co-PI Chong noted, borrowing from the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution initiative. “We focus on social aspects, applied ethics and responsibility working with people and data.” In their final projects, SPICE participants studied various issues, from Indo-Pacific Resilience and Hawaii Biodiversity to Tax and Housing Equity and Health. “All their projects were based on the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals,” Chong said. “These students upskilled in analytics, research and programming. We also had a lot of firsts this year. To name a few, it included an opportunity to use the TACC supercomputers at the University of Texas at Austin; we had technical directors who joined us in helping on sponsored projects; and three students presented their projects in their preferred or native language that included Spanish, Carolinian and Native Hawaiian.”

SPICE students in 2023 were generously sponsored by the NSF INCLUDES ALL-SPICE Alliance, the Hawaii EPSCoR program and the Pacific Intelligence Innovation Initiative