Publications & Media Coverage

AI/ML education is often split between technical model-building and data literacy, taught in isolation from each other. This paper presents a hands-on framework — debuting at the 2025 Big Data School in Costa Rica — that grounds AI learning in a single, richly structured real-world dataset (the Austin Real-Time Traffic Incident Reports), having learners apply classification, clustering, regression, and forecasting before converting the data into narrative text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

HPC-ED is a community-driven catalog for discovering and sharing CyberTraining resources, built around a flexible interface, thoughtful metadata design, and active community participation — letting authors share resources while retaining ownership, and letting organizations enrich their own local portals with shared materials. This paper describes the pilot phase: prototyping the catalog, establishing an initial metadata set, and gathering community feedback to plan the next implementation phase.

Archival record for the HackHPC@ADMI23 hackathon (June 26–29, 2023), a team-based event for undergraduates, faculty, staff, and technical specialists held as part of the ADMI Symposium on Computing at Minority Institutions. Built around the theme "Computing for Social Good," participants worked in pre-formed teams with a faculty and technical mentor each, after pre-hackathon training sessions on HPC and cyberinfrastructure.

Hackathons have been adapted to so many different contexts that best practices and research findings rarely cross between them. Drawing on an interdisciplinary workshop at the Lorentz Center, this paper reports six areas the authors see as central to deepening hackathon research and practice: designing for different purposes, socio-technical event design, scaling up, making hackathons equitable, studying hackathons, and setting and achieving hackathon goals.

Broadening-participation initiatives that engage students often leave faculty support behind, even though hackathons have proved useful for student engagement. This paper discusses the design of FacultyHack, a faculty-focused hackathon for curriculum development, outlining the logistics and structure of two past events, what changed between them, and the lessons learned.

An overview of SGX3's workforce development activities: forming and enriching relationships with minority-serving institutions to bring gateway development into curricula, bring domain-specific gateways into classrooms and research settings, and train faculty to sustain those efforts beyond the life of SGX3 itself, through the SGX3 Faculty Program's training, HPC account support, and curriculum-implementation consulting.

Developing a workforce with applied skills in high-performance computing (HPC) has highlighted a gap in the experiences current academic programs provide, especially at the entry level. HackHPC — a collaboration between the Science Gateways Community Institute, Omnibond Systems, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the University of Tartu — was formed to close that gap through hackathons. This paper reports on the development and refinement of the "HackHPC Model," covering the methodologies, participants, and procedures used to plan and host hackathon events that foster workforce development in HPC.

Time-bounded events can give newcomers to a scientific community their first hands-on programming experience, but access to computing resources alone isn't enough — they also need guidance and support. This paper reports on a hackathon format the authors ran in-person for two years and then had to move online during the 2020 pandemic, covering two virtual events, what worked, what didn't, and recommendations for other organizers.

A practical planning kit for hackathon organizers, originally developed in 2020 around 12 key decisions for preparing, running, and following up on an in-person event. This updated version accounts for the shift toward online and hybrid formats since the pandemic, adding guidance on the affordances and requirements of in-person, online, and hybrid events to each of the original 12 decisions, plus updated example timelines.