Xiaogang Marshall Ma received the WDS Data Stewardship Award in 2014 when he was a postdoctoral fellow working at the Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He joined the University of Idaho in 2016 and is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science. Marshall has continued his research interests in semantic web, knowledge graphs, general AI technologies, and their applications in Earth and environmental sciences.

“I would say the WDS Data Stewardship Award has had a multi-fold influence on my work. It is for the early-career professionals. Receiving the award in 2014 was a big encouragement for me to see the value of the work on data management and the methods and technologies needed, and a driving force for me to continue the work in this field.”

Marshall’s participation in WDS community activities has facilitated connections with many individual researchers and organizations, such as those in RDA, CODATA, and AGU. Among colleagues, topics of common interests often lead to significant actions and solutions. For example, under CODATA, Marshall and others established a working group to coordinate data standards amongst scientific unions. The results were published in Nature as a correspondence (doi:10.1038/d41586-022-03233-2) during an intensive discussion on metadata and standards. Data management and stewardship can always leverage state-of-the-art Web Science and AI technologies.

More recently, Marshall and his colleagues have been working on the open data service of Mindat, one of the largest databases in the field of mineralogy. They carefully checked the quality of the data, embedded a series of community-level standards, built packages in Python and R for researchers to use in workflow platforms, and coordinated discussions on technical approaches for data standards amongst several open geoscience data portals. In the last couple of months, Marshall and his team embarked on another innovative project to deploy large language models to develop a user-friendly interface for data query and access.

Marshall’s dedication to advancing data science ensures that his contributions will continue to shape the future landscape of Earth and environmental sciences. His collaborative spirit exemplifies how interdisciplinary efforts can drive impactful progress across various domains.

Submit your application for the prestigious WDS Data Stewardship Award here! This award can unlock unparalleled opportunities to advance your research, expand your professional network, and make impactful contributions to the global data science community.

 

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