Online Coffee lecture - Program October 2025 - March 2026 

2025

Wednesday 15.10. & 22 .10. 9-12 am Machine Learning Essentials & Workflows (Sonja Hänzelmann, AWI)
Mark your calendar: This October, we’re hosting a two-part online lecture series on Machine Learning! You’ll get a hands-on introduction to ML fundamentals and explore the full data science workflow through a real-world project. Full details and registration here

Online Coffee lecture - Program October 2024 - March 2025

2025
Tuesday 04.02. 10-12 am Introduction to Research Data Management (Justine Vandendorpe & Kathrin Grummich, ZBMED)
This Coffee Talk on Research Data Management (RDM) is aimed at all life-science researchers (with a focus on earth system scientists) who are interested in learning about best practices in data handling. Topics covered in this talk include basic concepts of RDM (What are research data and RDM? What are the FAIR data principles and the Good Research Practices (GRP)? What are metadata and how are they best used to document data?) and all steps of RDM from planning to data reuse, including data organisation, data storage and preservation, data repositories, and data discovery.This talk is offered by the ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences. It will take place online on 4 February 2025 from 10:00 to 12:00 and will be held in English.There will be no interactive activities and participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback. We look forward to welcoming you to this lecture! Register here

Tuesday 18.02. 11-12 am The OneStop4All - entry point to the resources of the NFDI4Earth (Sibylle Haßler, KIT; Ivonne Anders, DKRZ; Tom Niers, TUDD; Christin Henzen, TUDD)
The OneStop4All (OS4A) is the main access point to all NFDI4Earth resources and aims to support all searches and questions that the users from the Earth System Sciences (ESS) might have. This includes general principles of FAIR data and data management, finding and accessing (primarily ESS relevant) datasets, tools and services as well as training materials, and information about the NFDI4Earth, the involved organisations and participants.
We present the portal and its current functionalities and give some insight into the concept and development. Register here

Tuesday 04.03. 11-12 am Introducing Galaxy for Earth System (Jérôme Detoc, Ifremer; Marie Jossé, Data Terra, CNRS)
Galaxy now supports Earth sciences, including climate, ecology, and environmental research. With its open-source platform and commitment to FAIR principles, Galaxy provides a powerful set of tools for building, sharing, and replicating workflows. From novice to expert, researchers can access user-friendly tools for comprehensive data analysis without programming skills. Join a growing community leveraging advanced technologies and collaborative resources to drive insights into our planet’s systems—perfect for Earth data enthusiasts looking to elevate their research. More details can be found here. Register here

Tuesday 25.03. 11-12 am The NFDI4Earth Fairness and Openness Commitment (Daniel Nüst, TUDD)
The transition to fully FAIR and Open sharing of all research outputs requires a cultural and systemic change that evolves current practices and that promotes solutions for open data sharing. Only by working together as a community and building on the existing uptake of Open Science practices in the Earth System Sciences community can this happen.
NFDI4Earth as aims to become a central facilitator for research data management in the German Earth System Sciences community, enabling more open knowledge sharing. The NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment (https://nfdi4earth.de/commitment) is an initiative to engage the NFDI4Earth community in shaping, promoting, and implementing the NFDI4Earth mission. NFDI4Earth invites all individuals, groups, and institutions to sign the statement of commitment and become ambassadors for change towards more FAIR and Open data practices in Earth System Sciences.
In this talk, Daniel presents the NFDI4Earth Commitment, its genesis, and provides guidance for different stakeholders on the realisation of the Commitment's vision to advance FAIRness and Openness in Earth System Sciences and to value data infrastructures and data experts. Register here

2024
Tuesday 29.10. 11-12 am Introducing Data Train: Training in Research Data Management and Data Science (Lina Schaare, U Bremen Research Alliance)
For early career researchers, developing strong skills in data science, research data management, and data literacy is crucial to their personal and professional growth. The U Bremen Research Alliance offers the central graduate training program Data Train as an additional offering for researchers of all disciplines to enhance their data skills. Data Train is free of costs for participants and offers lectures, workshops and events for interdisciplinary exchange. Since November 2023, Data Train has been integrated into DataNord, the interdisciplinary data competence center for the Bremen region, which is associated with consortia of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiative. To meet the high demand for data competencies in academia, industry and society at large, further development of the Data Train program is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and financed by the European Union – NextGe​nerationEU. The talk will give an overview of the Data Train program and its contents, as well as highlight opportunities for NFDI4Earth researchers to get involved in the 2025 edition of Data Train.

Tuesday 12.11. 09-12 am NLP & LLMs: Basics for Harnessing the power of language (Matthias Aßenmacher, LMU Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), BERD@NFDI)
This 3h online workshop is ideal for researchers who want to learn about the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) for their research and gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of those models which are frequently perceived as black boxes. You will receive a broad overview of the theoretical foundations of NLP, learn about practical considerations, and get an idea of how to apply this technology to real-world problems. A more exhaustive variant of this course is available at https://slds-lmu.github.io/dl4nlp/ (full lecture). This lecture is in cooperation with the BERD Academy. Register here

Tuesday 26.11. 11-12 am Introducting the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)-Toolbox (Manjunatha Veerappa, IOSB)
The XAI toolbox developed by Fraunhofer IOSB is designed with AI explainability at its core. It enables the swift evaluation of various  XAI methods for AI procedures. That is, the toolbox can be used, for example, for data analysis, debugging, and explaining the prediction of any black-box model. This ensures trustworthiness in AI decisions. Currently, it supports scikit and TensorFlow based time series as well as image classifiers. Register here

Tuesday 10.12. 11-12 am Data Competence Centers: Enhancing Data-Driven Research with Come2Data, DataNord & WiNoDa (Lena Steinmann, Universität Bremen & Data Science Center; Tanja Hörner, Universität Bremen & U Bremen Research Alliance; Alex Miklashevsky, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
The German Federal Government’s data strategy and the BMBF’s Action Plan for Research Data aim to strengthen data literacy in science by  supporting researchers in managing the growing volume of research data. To foster innovation, the BMBF is funding the establishment of data competence centers at universities and research institutions across Germany. These centers offer comprehensive support for all stages of the data lifecycle, from collection to reuse, and serve as hubs for learning, collaboration, and advancing data-driven research, helping to create a culture of effective data use and  analysis in science. NFDI4Earth is collaborating with three centers:  Come2Data, WiNoDa and DataNord.
In a Saxon-regional approach, Come2Data (Competence Center for Interdisciplin­ary Data Sciences) bundles existing data science training and support services as well as expertise and commitment to research data management, NFDI, high-performance computing and analysis methods for data-intensive interdisciplinary research applications such as artificial intelligence  and data modeling. DataNord (Interdisciplinary Data Competence Centre for the Bremen Region) offers researchers from all disciplines and career stages a wide range of  services to enhance their data handling skills throughout the entire data lifecycle; these include training sessions,  hackathons, consulting services, opportunities for networking and professional exchange. The WiNoDa project (Knowledge Lab for  Natural Science Collections and Object-Related Data) is creating a data competence center to support researchers in effectively utilizing these collections and advancing research in this domain. Register here

Online Coffee lecture - Program Spring 2024

Friday 12.01. 11-12 am GFZ Data Services (Kirsten Elger, GFZ)
GFZ Data Services is a repository for research data and scientific software across the Earth System Sciences, hosted at GFZ. The curated data are archived, persistently accessible and published with DOI. They range from large dynamic datasets from global monitoring networks with real-time acquisition, to international services in geodesy and geophysics, to the full suite of small and highly heterogeneous datasets collected by individual researchers or small teams ("long-tail data"). In addition to the DOI registration and data archiving itself, GFZ Data Services team offers comprehensive consultation by domain scientists and IT specialists.
This presentation will introduce to the broad service portfolio of GFZ Data Services, including project-specific DOI landing pages for our national and international partners, data curation practices, supporting tools like the online metadata editor, data description templates and extensive data publication guidelines. It will further show examples of how metadata exchange with other data portals is increasing the visibility of our data publications.

Friday 26.01. 11-12 am FID GEO: Library services to make your research more visible and accessible (Melanie Lorenz, GFZ)  Cancelled! Our apologies
The FachInformationsDienst für Geowissenschaften (FID GEO, Specialized Information Service for Geosciences) is a nationwide service for all geoscientists working in Germany. Our team of highly networked librarians, data publishing experts and geoscientists provides services and advice on Open Science issues in the geosciences. We offer Open Access electronic publishing of your research results such as research data, software and texts via our domain repositories (GEO-LEOe-docs and GFZ Data Services) as well as digitisation. This lecture will be recorded for internal usage.

Friday 09.02. 11-12 am is unfortunately cancelled

Wednesday 21.02. 11-12 am Geo-INQUIRE (Fabrice Cotton, Stefanie Weege, GFZ)
Geo-INQUIRE (Geosphere INfrastructures for QUestions into Integrated REsearch) fosters excellent, interdisciplinary and curiosity-driven research of the solid Earth, including land-sea-atmosphere interfaces. The EU project benefits from a unique partnership of 51 European partners. Now, the 1st Geo-INQUIRE Transnational Access Call to European research infrastructures is open and provides access to unique high-level installations and experiments. Geo-INQUIRE is welcoming applications from researchers, technicians, students and other specialists working in the fields of research covered by the installations. The call is open until 15 March 2024. In addition, Geo-INQUIRE offers online seminars, online training, on-site workshops, on-site summer schools and in the near future personalised training, all free of charge. We promote equality, diversity and inclusion in all Geo-INQUIRE activities. Therefore, applications from women and applications from people working in one of the widening countries, associated countries and outermost regions of Horizon Europe will be given special attention during the whole project life time. For questions feel free to contact geo-i_pmo@gfz-potsdam.de

Friday 08.03. 11-12 am Inferring Causal Relationships from Data - An Introduction (Jonas Wahl, DLR & TU Berlin)
One of the primary goals of many research fields is to infer and describe causal relationships between scientific phenomena based on observational and experimental data. In the last decades, scientists and statisticians have developed a variety of formalisms as a scientific language for causal claims, as well as many algorithms that aim to infer causal networks or causal effects under different assumptions. I will give an introduction to the Causal Inference framework of Pearl and others and describe its current state-of-the-art with a particular focus on time series data.

Friday 22.03. 11-12 am Explainable Machine Learning: Basics & Beyond (Lorenz Linhardt, TU Berlin)
Machine learning (ML) methods have become ubiquitous in the sciences. Despite their widespread usage, it is unclear what they learn and where they may fail. Explainable ML methods attempt to provide additional insights into the inner workings of ML models and their decision-making strategies. This talk will give a brief introduction to explainable ML, in particular well-established methods, and will provide pointers to more recent developments.

Friday 12.04. 11-12 am The DataHub - empowering digital data-driven research (Martin Hammitzsch, GFZ)
The DataHub, a collaborative effort across the seven research centers within the Research Field Earth and Environment of the Helmholtz Association, aims to break down data silos and empower research. This integrative initiative, anchored in the field's joint research program, brings together previously separate marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric research data into a single, open, and interoperable information hub. Following the FAIR principles, the DataHub will serve as a digital ecosystem for researchers to store, manage, share, and analyze their data across disciplines and institutions. It provides a federated data infrastructure and a suite of tools for advancing research digitalization and fostering a cultural shift within the field Earth and Environment. This interconnected and interoperable data infrastructure stands as a significant contribution to the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) - notably, it will support NFDI4Earth.

Friday 26.04. 11-12 am SIS MAPS (FID Karten) - Specialised Information Service Cartography and Geodata (Cornelia Koch & Martin Jeske, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
The SIS Maps, located in the Map Department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The lecture will focus on the services of the SIS, which are aimed in particular at scientists of geoinformation but also at the interdisciplinary professional community who use maps. They include the largely digital provision of specialist information on cartographic materials (literature, glossary, maps and geodata) as well as infrastructures that enable them to be found and accessed (special catalogues, bibliography and repository).