Syllabus

Weekly Schedule

Thursdays | 08:15 - 10:00 and 18:15 - 20:00

08:15 - 10:00 | Morning Session

18:15 - 20:00 | Evening Session

What problems do you work on? What data do you work with?

• Data infrastructures, data aggregation, data sovereignty
• Where data exist: platforms, APIs, cloud catalogs
• Introduction to STAC — what it is and why these infrastructures matter
• Data frictions: the gap between data availability and data access

Applied Work: Finding Data in the STAC Catalog

Get into groups — start with the paper you read

• Look for the data described or needed in your paper inside a STAC catalog
• What infrastructures do these data live on? How big are they?
• What does it mean to access them? What frictions do you encounter?

Cloud-Native Computing and MCPs

• Working with data you cannot (or should not) download
• Cloud-native workflows: COGs, STAC queries, on-demand computation
• Introduction to Model Context Protocol (MCP) for data access — see MCP Servers page
• Live demo: STAC query and NDVI computation

Explore: MCPs and Data Structures

Open exploration — doesn't have to be your group's paper topic

• Connect to an MCP server and run a query
• Explore what data structures and metadata are returned

Projects and Deep Dives: Introduction

• Groups choose a dataset and policy question to investigate
• Framing: what would you actually need to answer this question?

Group Work: Deep Dives

• Work through your chosen dataset and question
• Document what you found, what was hard, and what remains uncertain

Report Back and Closing

• Brief group reports
• Closing reflection: What does it mean to do policy analysis in a world of planetary-scale, uneven, and infrastructure-dependent data?