We often see data as just characters on our computer screen. However, each character has a story to tell: an ingenious machine that breaks the genome down in pieces and reads its sequence; an amazing person who fights incurable disease and volunteers for case studies; and a visionary who spends a lifetime looking at these data to find hidden patterns and meaning. In this seminar series, we will learn about data from different fields of science: how they are collected - the technology and the human efforts behind it - and how they contribute to better understanding the world around us.

We will hear from experts in their respective fields of study, and learn about,

• what field of science do they work on (e.g., gene therapy or earthquake modelling)

• what is the nature of data associated with it (e.g., tabular, text, images, time series, networks, structured/non-structured, big/small, readily available/very rare etc.),

• where does the data come from (e.g., the data might come from a global effort in understanding a socio-economic issue, or it might come from a patient in critical care),

• how is the data collected (e.g., data collection often uses cutting edge techniques such as sequencing the human genome, or observing a material in extreme conditions)

• how is the data processed and analyzed (e.g., it might involve simple statistical tools with careful prior choices or state-of-the-art machine learning on big data)

• what has been done with this kind of data (e.g., the questions that have been answered so far, such as the functionality of a gene, or the responsiveness of a drug)

• what are the open/ground-breaking questions that need answering (e.g., what is the respective field of study trying to achieve as a community)

• whether the data is publicly available (e.g., if the data and/or similar data are easily available, if so then where and how one can access it, and if not then what is the alternative)

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