The Office of Research Outputs awards its Deposit of the Quarter Prize to Associate Professor Casimir Beng, recognising a repository deposit that annotated every missing sensor reading in a four-site allotment telemetry study rather than leaving the gap unexplained.
The prize recognises Associate Professor Casimir Beng's repository deposit for a four-site allotment telemetry study, in which every missed sensor reading is filed with the reason it is missing.
A sensor that goes quiet for an hour has told the University two entirely different things, and its research repository has never made a depositor say which: that nothing happened at the plot it was watching, or that the sensor itself stopped watching. This quarter’s Deposit of the Quarter Prize goes to the record that stopped letting the two look the same.
The Office of Research Outputs has awarded the Prize to Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement, for the deposit lodged behind Towards Unified Plot-Compliance Telemetry, the barcode-and-sensor study of four community allotment sites. Every scan the platform failed to log across its fourteen-month deployment is entered in the filed dataset against one of three causes — sensor offline, plot obscured, or a scan attempted and rejected — rather than left as an empty cell indistinguishable from a plot nobody checked on at all.
A blank cell in a compliance dataset reads as “nothing to report.” Most of the time it means the equipment failed to report anything, which is a completely different finding, and I did not want anyone downstream mistaking one for the other.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
Co-author Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, welcomed the recognition: “every dashboard I maintain inherits somebody else’s blank cells eventually. It is rare to inherit a set that already tells you why they’re blank.”
The Office reviews each quarter’s crop of deposits against how much of a dataset’s own uncertainty survives into the filed record, and reads this one as the standard its own review process is built to reward. The Prize carries $42,917 and a missing-data key the Office is recommending as a model for the next telemetry deposit that crosses its desk.
Deposit of the Quarter Prize: For a Deposit That Explained Its Own Gaps Instead of Leaving Them Blank · $42,917 · awarded to Casimir Beng