Social Sciences Projects
Ellis Ackerman (Math, NCSU), Rodrigo Araujo (Computer Science), and Samantha Miezio (Public Policy) spent ten weeks building tools to help understand the scope, cause, and effects of evictions in Durham County. Using evictions data recorded by the Durham County Sheriff’s Department and demographic data from the American Community Survey, the team investigated relationships between rent and...
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...
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...
The QSIDES Institute has pulled thousands of pages of police records from the Williamstown Police Department. This project will analyze and identify patterns in police behavior in the town, work with journalists and other activists to use the data to develop action plans to address problems and enact public safety...
A student team led by researchers at Duke Surgery and Global Health Institute will further develop the computer application – Alcohol Use Behavioral Phenotyping Test (AUBPT) that can help predict alcohol use and alcohol use disorder risks based on personal characteristics and behavioral performance on Research Domain Criteria paradigms/games. Students...
A team of students led by researchers Nicole Schramm-Sapyta (Duke Institute for Brain Sciences) and Maria Tackett (Statistical Science) will explore the impacts of community health services and local laws and policies on the justice-involved population in Durham. The team will create a public-facing interactive timeline of the implementation of...
Jennie Wang (Economics/Computer Science) and Blen Biru (Biology/French) spent ten weeks building visualizations of various aspects of the lives of orphaned and separated children at six separate sites in Africa and Asia. The team created R Shiny interactive visualizations of data provided by the Positive Outcomes for Orphans study (POFO). Executive Summary (PDF) Project...
Aaron Crouse (Divinity), Mariah Jones (Sociology), Peyton Schafer (Statistics), and Nicholas Simmons (English/Education) spent ten weeks consulting with leadership from the Parents Teacher Association at Glenn Elementary School in Durham. The team set up infrastructure for data collection and visualization that will aid the PTA in forming future strategy. Click here to read the Executive Summary Disciplines...
Melanie Lai Wai (Statistics) and Saumya Sao (Global Health, Gender Studies) spent ten weeks developing a platform which enables users to understand factors that influence contraceptive use and discontinuation. Their work combined data from the Demographic and Health Surveys contraceptive calendar with open data about reproductive health and social indicators from the World...
Ashley Murray (Chemistry/Math), Brian Glucksman (Global Cultural Studies), and Michelle Gao (Statistics/Economics) spent 10 weeks analyzing how meaning and use of the work “poverty” changed in presidential documents from the 1930s to the present. The students found that American presidential rhetoric about poverty has shifted in measurable ways over time. Presidential rhetoric, however, doesn’t necessarily...
Natalie Bui (Math/Economics), David Cheng (Electrical & Computer Engineering), and Cathy Lee (Statistics) spent ten weeks helping the Prospect Management and Analytics office of Duke Development understand how a variety of analytic techniques might enhance their workflow. The team used topic modeling and named entity recognition to develop a pipeline that clusters potential prospects into useful categories....
Tatanya Bidopia (Psychology, Global Health), Matthew Rose (Computer Science), Joyce Yoo (Public Policy/Psychology) spent ten weeks doing a data-driven investigation of the relationship between mental health training of law enforcement officers and key outcomes such as incarceration, recidivism, and referrals for treatment. They worked closely with the Crisis Intervention Team, and they used jail data provided...
Anna Vivian (Physics, Art History) and Vinai Oddiraju (Stats) spent ten weeks working closely with the director of the Durham Neighborhood Compass. Their goal was to produce metrics for things like ambient stress and neighborhood change, to visualize these metrics within the Compass system, and to interface with a variety of community...
Yanmin (Mike) Ma, mathematics/economics major, and Manchen (Mercy) Fang, electrical and computer engineering/computer science major, spent ten weeks studying historical archives and building a model to predict the price of pigs, relative to a number of interesting factors. Project Results Berkshire pig transaction price is influenced by factors including the age of...
Luke Raskopf, PoliSci major and Xinyi (Lucy) Lu, Stats/CompSci major, spent ten weeks investigating the effectiveness of policies to combat unemployment and wage stagnation faced by working and middle-class families in the State of North Carolina. They worked closely with Allan Freyer at the North Carolina Justice Center. Project Results The team used regression and...
Robbie Ha (Computer Science, Statistics), Peilin Lai (Computer Science, Mathematics), and Alejandro Ortega (Mathematics) spent ten weeks analyzing the content and dissemination of images of the Syrian refugee crisis, as part of a general data-driven investigation of Western photojournalism and how it has contributed to our understanding of this crisis. Project Results: The team gathered...
Over ten weeks, Computer Science Majors Amber Strange and Jackson Dellinger joined forces with Psychology major Rachel Buchanan to perform a data-driven analysis of mental health intervention practices by Durham Police Department. They worked closely with leadership from the Durham Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Collaborative, made up of officers who have completed 40 hours of specialized training in mental illness...
Using data from the Durham Compass and the NC School Report Card among many other sources, this team will continue the development of an interactive R Shiny dashboard that permits exploration of school statistical data. The team aims to explore school zones through an asset-based lens in an effort to support ethical...
In this two-day, virtual data expedition project, students were introduced to the APIM in the context of stress proliferation, linked lives, the spousal relationship, and mental and physical health outcomes. Stress proliferation is a concept within the stress process paradigm that explains how one person’s stressors can influence others (Thoits...
Stats/Sociology major Mitchelle Mojekwu joined Neuroscience majors Kassie Hamilton and Zineb Jaidi in a ten-week exploration of data relevant to an upcoming public school zone redistricting in Durham County. Using information acquired from the General Social Survey and the US Census, the team applied modern mathematical and statistical methods for...
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