University of Albany, UCAR, and partners receive $1.6 million NSF award for Project Pythia Phase 2

A new three-year, $1.6 million multi-institutional project from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will support phase two of “Project Pythia,” a collaborative effort to collect high-quality interactive learning tools for Python-based data analysis and visualization in the geosciences, all hosted on a freely available website.

Led by Brian Rose, an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University at Albany's College of Arts and Sciences, collaborators include John Clyne and Orhan Eroglu from CISL, Ryan May from Unidata, James Munroe from 2i2c, Amelia Snyder of the US Geological Survey, and Kevin Tyle at the University of Albany. 

With new support, the research team aims to make Project Pythia a “go-to” educational resource for the geoscience community, helping tackle significant technical barriers around data access and analysis.

“Project Pythia is building a community around open datasets and openly shared computational workflow knowledge, taking advantage of cloud computing to level the playing field for students, educators and scientists,” Rose said.

CISL’s Clyne led phase 1 of Project Pythia starting in 2020 through previous support from the NSF. The next phase will focus on growing what the researchers call Pythia “cookbooks,” which are essentially a collection of “raw ingredients” (publicly available data) and recipes for transforming the raw ingredients into scientifically useful results at the click of a button. Over the next three years, the research team plans to dramatically increase the amount of cookbook content and the community of scientists, educators, and students in geosciences that are using and contributing to them. Everything developed through Project Pythia is free and available to the public.

At CISL and Unidata, funds will support project personnel who will work on developing and maintaining cookbook content and the underlying software infrastructure. 2i2c is a non-profit that designs, develops and manages open-source cloud computing services for research and education.

See the University of Albany press release for more information or visit the Project Pythia site.