Meeting on the Waterfront

For the first time since its foundation in 2019, the PhD students and a large number of scientific supervisors of the Helmholtz School for Marine Data Science (MarDATA) met in Kiel for an academic exchange. The PhD school, funded by the Helmholtz Association and coordinated at GEOMAR, includes scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, as well as from the partner universities Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU), Bremen University and Jacobs University Bremen. This meeting was primarily used to present and discuss the scientific results of the first cohort of PhD students, which started in 2019. This gave selected projects the opportunity to present their findings so far in short talks.
 
"The MarDATA projects located in the marine data sciences are characterized by an enormous range of marine scientific issues," explains scientific coordinator Dr. Enno Prigge. "Aspects such as the optimization of biogeochemical models or the improvement of autonomous underwater navigation are covered as well as the development of methods for image-based seafloor categorization and the further development of algorithms for the detection of icequakes." In addition to the presentations of the first cohort, the PhD students of the second cohort, which started in 2021, were also able to present their research projects in a poster presentation.
The speaker of the graduate school, Professor Dr. Arne Biastoch, expert for ocean modeling at GEOMAR, successfully co-founded MarDATA in 2019. In the second cohort, he also supervises PhD students himself: "The presented work has clearly shown that our original idea, with which we started MarDATA a little more than three years ago, works," says Professor Biastoch. "The PhD students bring strong computational science expertise that, when combined with interdisciplinary co-supervision by marine and computational scientists:in, produces innovative approaches that bring clear added value to the established marine sciences." Huge amounts of data are already being collected about our ocean worldwide, from satellite measurements to current data and measurements from autonomous robotic systems. "New innovative methods are needed to capture the information and make it usable - and specialist:s who can use data science to see the bigger picture in ways that traditional methods can't."
In addition to the project presentations, the meeting was also used to provide external impulses by experts from industry and science and to discuss internal challenges such as the publication of marine data science results and communication in interdisciplinary teams. While Jann Wendt, founder and CEO of North.io GmbH, presented the maritime digitization project Marispace-X, in which GEOMAR is also involved and which has a clear focus on industrial application areas, Professor Dr. Christian L. Müller from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and Helmholtz Munich showed the many possible overlapping fields between his own data-driven research and the issues worked on in MarDATA.
 
"This meeting was a complete success," Dr. Enno Prigge concludes, emphasizing that "the PhD students in particular missed this personal exchange, because even if the scientific issues differ greatly in detail, the personal and interdisciplinary challenges in the individual PhD projects are very often similar." After three days, Professor Dr. Arne Biastoch summarizes: "We have taken the first steps, and the results of the ongoing projects in MarDATA so far show that we are on the right track. The extensive discussions of the last few days have provided many new impulses and have shown us what additional potential still remains dormant in the interdisciplinary approaches of marine data science. We will now incorporate these into our future concept and hope to thereby advance the linking of marine and data sciences even further."
 
Project funding:
The Helmholtz School for Marine Data Science (MarDATA) is one of a total of 6 Helmholtz Information & Data Science Schools (HIDSS) funded by Helmholtz and will be funded in the first phase from 2019 to 2025