Kang Ni, Math/Econ major, Kehan Zhang, Econ/Stats/ major, and Alex Hong, spent ten weeks investigating a large collection of grocery store transaction data. They worked closely with Matt Harding Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research Center. (BECR Center).
Project Results
The team used clustering techniques to identify distinct sets of products, a good first step towards developing a customer preference index.
Download the executive summary (PDF).
Disciplines Involved
L-R: Kang Ni, Alex Hong, Kehan Zhang
Project Team
Undergraduates: Alex Hong, Kehan Zhang, and Kang Ni
Client: Matt Harding, Director, BECR Center
Project Mentor: Ya Xue, Data Scientist, BECR Center
A team of students collaborating with Duke School of Medicine's Root Causes Fresh Produce Program, community members, and physicians throughout the Duke Health network will help integrate data from food deliveries to Duke Health patients with patient health record data and other available data sources to create a dashboard that can analyze, predict, and manage the Root Causes' "Food as Medicine" program. Specific outcomes will contribute to improving the Program's quantitative evaluation of its health impact as well as efficiency and satisfaction for its patients. Students will be assisted with IRB approval and mentorship from faculty and community advisors.
Project Leads: Esko Brummel, Willis Wong
A team of students led by researchers at the Duke Marine Lab will explore the changing distribution of krill around the Antarctic Peninsula. Krill are a key prey species in this ecosystem, supporting a number of animals including whales, seals, and penguins, but they are dependent on winter sea ice and may be in trouble as climate change progresses. Using data from acoustic zooplankton surveys, students will create maps and other products to visualize the spatial distribution of krill over the past 20 summers, then create metrics that allow us to quantify the way that krill distribution around the Antarctic Peninsula is changing as the climate shifts and ice melts. These results will be key to our understanding of the impacts of climate change on this polar ecosystem.
Project Lead: Douglas Nowacek
Project Manager: Amanda Lohmann
A team of students will partner closely with the City of Durham's newly formed Community Safety Department. The Community Safety Department's mission is to identify, implement, and evaluate new approaches to enhance public safety that may not involve a law enforcement response or the criminal justice system. The student team will (1) analyze and identify geographic and temporal patterns in 911 calls for service, (2) conceptualize and build an abstracted data pipeline and tools that would enrich currently available 911 data with other social, economic, and health-related data, (3) explore associations between areas of high call volume, indicators of mental health distress, and histories of dispossession; and (4) identify methods by which future researchers could examine connections between varied 911 incident responses (e.g. police response, unarmed response, joint police, and mental health response) and life trajectories (e.g. arrest, jail time, hospitalization, unemployment, etc.).
Project Lead: Greg Herschlag, Anise Van, City of Durham
Project Manager: Deekshita Saikia
