My daughter’s research group (she’s a grad student at the University of Colorado Boulder) is sponsoring an event in January called the Clear Earth Semantic Software Hackathon. This is beyond my understanding or experience, but I’ll do a little signal-boosting anyway — if you know what this stuff is, the application is due by 15 August.

The goal of the hackathon is to tackle cross-domain – earth sciences / computational linguistics – problems with the help of local experts, linguists, and earth scientists. Those problems could involve natural text, datasets, software tools, visulizations. Applicants must propose a week-long project as part of their application. Suggestions are: NLP/ML tools, information extraction, ontology-building, or any topic of interest that relates linguistics and earth science in a ML framework. In the earth sciences we include all earth-ice-life (geo-cryo-eco) studies. At the end of the hackathon, participants will present their tools and post them on GitHub. Applicants may apply as individuals or in groups of up to three – building a team within or across universities is strongly encouraged! Applicants may also choose to form a small group at the outset of the hackathon, or may choose to work alone. The only requirement is the development of a prototype linguistics-related software or data tool. The hackathon is NSF funded, and applicants need only bring a laptop and other essentials. Accommodation, travel and transport, and meals+ are covered.