Open-source Spatial Visualization for Public Health Intelligence

Project Summary

Linda Adams(CompSci), Amanda Jankowski (Sociology, Global Health), and Jessica Needleman (Statistics/Economics) spent ten weeks prototyping small-area mapping of public-health information within the Durham Neighborhood Compass, with a focus on mortality data. They worked closely with the director of DataWorks NC, an independent data intermediary dedicated to democratizing the use of quantitative information.

Themes and Categories
Public Policy
Data+
Year
2017
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Project Results: The team created a publically-available R Shiny app that enables users to interactively visualize Durham County mortality rates at a variety of geographic levels. They also built an app which allows the visualization of more fine-grained, sensitive information for internal use by county health departments. Finally, they worked with the East Durham Children's Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to develop and coordinate services to meet the needs of children. The team was able to create a geospatial shape file that provides mortality data specifically tailored to the EDCI service area.

Click here for the Executive Summary

Project Leads:

John Killeen, Durham Neighborhood Compass

Project Managers:

Libby McClure

 

 

 

Related People

Related Projects

Predictive Maintenance of F15s

The Air Force’s F-15E Strike Eagle jets have parts that wear down and break, causing unscheduled maintenance events that take away valuable time in the air for critical missions and training. Our team, Limitless Data, is working with Seymour Johnson Air Force Base to mine manually entered maintenance data to visualize and predict aircraft failures. We created a prototype data visualization product that will enable maintainers on the flight line and help them identify and repair critical failures before they happen, keeping jets ready to fly, fight and win.

 

Faculty Lead: Dr. Emma Rasiel

Client Lead: Lt. Devon Burger

Project Manger:  Vignesh Kumaresan

Neural Network-Based Self-Adjusting Computational Processors

This project aims to improve the computational efficiency of signal operations, e.g., sampling and multiplying signals. We design machine learning-based signal processing modules that use an adaptive sampling strategy and interpolation to generate a good approximation of the exact output. While ensuring a low error level, improvements in computational efficiency can be expected for digital signal processing systems using the implemented self-adjusting modules.

Project Leads: Yi Feng, Vahid Tarokh

 

Click here to view the project team's poster

 

Watch the team's final presentation (on Zoom) here:

 

Computational Approaches to the History of Cartography

Mapping History has focused on the categorizing, labelling, digitization, and 3D reconstruction of 16th & 17th century maps & atlases of London and Lisbon. Over the course of the summer, the Mapping History team has developed its own unique analytical dataset by painstakingly labelling every element contained within these maps, used python to digitize this dataset, and, now in the projects final stage, has begun the process of reconstructing these historical perspectives in a 3D game engine.

Project Lead: Philip Stern, Ed Triplett

Project Manager: Sam Horewood

 

View the team's final poster here

Watch the team's final presentation (on Zoom) below:

See all Research