The UPSiE (formerly UASPSE) team and the University of North Dakota are hosting a rotating series of webinars called Unmanning Data Mondays: Getting the human out of unmanned aerial systems data. The webinars are hosted in person from institutions involved with UPSiE and the Midwest Data Hub, and will be streamed online.

Webinar Title: Opportunities, Challenges, and Progress in Managing the sUAS/RPAS Data

Presenters:
Jane Wyngaard, Ph.D, Data Scientist, University of Notre Dame
Andrea Thomer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Information, University of Michigan
Lindsay Barbieri, Ph.D., Gund Graduate Fellow, University of Vermont

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) (aka “drones”, or RPAS) are rapidly changing how a broad range of researchers in many domains collect data. However, in order for these data to be fully utilised they must be made FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable), and doing so requires addressing multiple challenges as a joint community. Much can be borrowed and learnt from analogous domains (satellites, sensor networks, underwater gliders, manned aircraft) and various groups around the world are addressing various components of the challenge. Within the Research Data Alliance sUAS data Interest Group we are working to draw these groups into common conversations.

Additionally, as an initial practical step - under a ESIP Laboratories award - we are working to address the need to augment the data with machine-readable, semantically-rich metadata, and to annotate them in ways that make their provenance (the record of the processes that created the data) explicit. In sUAS-based research this is particularly challenging given the many agents (e.g. people, sUAS, sensors, controllers, computers, software systems), and complex processes (e.g. pre- and post- correction processing, data integration) that work together but within often inexplicit relationships. We will discuss our progress on this effort so far as well as highlighting some of the other groups globally working on components of the broader challenges.

Individuals can also link directly to the webinar via Zoom. See the Unmanning Data Mondays webpage for full information about this webinar and the series.