Student teams will develop a benchmark dataset and explore its efficacy in an in house competition where they will put new innovative techniques such as machine learning to the test through a series of challenges.  A team of students will develop benchmark data pertaining to network performance in the presence of intentional and non-intentional degradation, ranging from sensor failure and additive noise to adversarial interference.  The students will analyze the baseline performance of the network, and measure performance of the degraded network with and without the inclusion of robust techniques that shore up robustness.  Students will have the opportunity to present findings to scientists & engineers from the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Faculty leads: Robert Calderbank, Vahid Tarokh, Ali Pezeshki

Client leads: Dr. Lauren Huie, Dr. Elizabeth Bentley, Dr. Zola Donovan, Dr. Ashley Prater-Bennette, Dr. Erin Trip

Project Manger: Suya Wu

Finding similarity and node correspondence among networks has been widely applied in social network analysis, network de-anonymization, protein-protein interaction (PPI) network alignment, and shape matching in computer vision. A team of students led by Professor Jiaming Xu and Ph.D. student Sophie Yu will implement our recently developed graph matching and similarity scoring algorithms, test their empirical performance in real datasets, and further improve the algorithm design by incorporating domain knowledge. Multiple datasets will be explored such as Facebook ego network, Covid PPI network, Isobase PPI network, computer vision datasets, and Wikipedia article networks. A visualization app will be built to facilitate researchers and practitioners to apply graph matching in relevant applications.

Along with the Energy Data Analytics Lab and the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative, students will explore how machine learning can be developed to better identify and characterize energy infrastructure and scale up its application across geographies. Using synthetic data generation such as style transfer and/or 3D models to create images of artificial cities and communities, we will examine how well an algorithm trained on one set of training data is able to adapt to new places and types of energy infrastructure. This research will increase the speed and scale of assessment towards an automated, global assessment of energy infrastructure. The resulting data would empower decisionmakers and energy system planners to make better decisions for planning electricity system development for communities with limited electricity access or reliability.

The goal of this project is to use evaluation data collected on baseball athletes to make predictions about their on-field performance in competitive games. Evaluation data includes visual skills assessed with eye tracking, movement screening data and simulated batting performance metrics collected in virtual reality that are measured as part of the USA Baseball Prospect Development Pipeline. Using regression and Bayesian statistical analyses we will identify characteristics of these data that correlate with batting performance in order to inform scouts about the likely production of developmental prospects. The final product will be an application that uses an athlete's assessment results to produce performance summary graphs for the individual compared to other athletes and inferential models for the relationships between assessments and performance.

Project Leads: Marc Richard, Suhail Mithani, Greg Appelbaum

The Root Causes Fresh Produce Program, led by an interdisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate students at Duke and UNC, leverages the power of student volunteers and community partnerships to address food insecurity in our community by delivering fresh and locally sourced produce to the doorsteps of patients in the Duke, Lincoln, and Samaritan Community health systems. Our program leadership is looking for team members to join us in exploring the use of data visualization and analysis to improve upon the processes that allow us to carry out our student-run service. Specific projects will include improving the program’s delivery route optimization software, improving the crop assessment and inventory management tools of small farmers and wholesale markets, as well as developing a dashboard integrating client location data and GIS information to identify location-specific service providers. Together, in collaborating with our team of interdisciplinary students as well as local Durham agencies, we hope to give you an opportunity to make an impact on our local community and food system while gaining a deeper appreciation for the role of data visualization and analysis through a population health intervention.

Project Lead: Willis Wong

A team of students led by members of the Duke IT Security Office will develop machine learning features that can be used to identify previously unknown web attacks.  Attacks targetting websites and web applications are continuous across the internet and protecting Duke's web infrastructure is part of the IT Security Office's mission.  The team will have a large dataset of logs from web traffic to explore possible features and evaluate their usefulness for identifiying new types of web attacks.  The results from this project may be incorporated into Duke's IT security infrastructure to help protect Duke's network in the future.

Project Lead: Eric Hope

The goal of this Data+ project is to apply and extend custom analytics solutions to discover how life remains resilient in extreme environments. An explosion of data has resulted from recent discoveries of tiny single-celled life hiding out in the most extreme places on Earth. These single celled creatures, or microbes, thrive in hot springs at boiling temperatures, in brine lakes saturated with salt, and in deserts once thought to be sterile. Studies in the Schmid lab at Duke have generated large data sets tracking how microbes grow and change their gene expression when faced with extreme stress. However, the majority of these data remain to be analyzed. In this Data+ project, students will apply and extend the statistical models to ask how extreme microbes grow and change during exposure to nutrient deprivation, extreme stress, and genetic mutations.

(photo credit: Peter Tonner et al., 2020 PLoS Computational Biology https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008366 )

Project Lead: Amy Schmidt

Project Manager: David Buch

Who should get to decide what a utopian society looks like? After London was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666, its reconstruction into the “emerald gem of Europe” was heavily influenced by the monarchy and aristocratic elites. In building a utopian epicenter focused on political and economic interests, immense sacrifices had to be made by London’s most marginalized citizens. A team of students led by Nicholas Smolenski (PhD Candidate, Musicology) and Dr. Astrid Giugni (Lecturing Fellow, English) will thus explore how London was rebuilt into a utopia; by employing topic modeling and applying the resulting lexicon to seventeenth-century architectural sketches, students will demonstrate how a language of progress became inextricably linked to its own image while also exposing the paradoxes entrenched in utopic representation. This project will additionally show how its framework can apply to current political discourse, as the tearing down of statues and monuments over the past three years has highlighted inescapable tensions between a governing power, a nation’s history, and its people.

Mental illness is often over-represented among the incarcerated population.  Durham county leaders are aware of this, and have taken many steps in recent years to support incarcerated people with mental illness and also to reduce incarceration in this population.  This work requires a community-wide effort, and Duke University Health System, as the major health care provider in the county, has a potential role to play. This Data + team will use data from the Durham County Detention Facility and Duke Health System to examine patterns of health-service utilization in the incarcerated population, including those with and without mental illness diagnoses.  We will use statistical methods such as longitudinal modeling to analyze the effects of the many interventions recently implemented, including increased mental health services, medication-assisted treatment for addiction, among others.  

Project Lead: Nicole Schramm-Sapyta

Project Manager: Ruth Wygle

Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon off-sets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). Concern with the morality of consumption is not new to capitalist societies; we can find debates on the ethics of consumption in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A team of students led by Dr. Astrid Giugni (English, Duke) and Dr. Jessica Hines (English, Birmingham Southern College) will analyze approximately 60,000 Medieval and Renaissance digitized texts by performing topic modelling, which will allow them to track associations between the languages of consumer culture and ethical practice.The team will organize their results in a series of visualizations that trace the development of the ethics of ‘consumerism’ in terms of frequency of use, timeline of relevant events, authorship, location of publication and name of printer/printing press, and genres.

Female baboons occasionally exhibit large swellings on their behinds. Although these ‘sexual swellings’ may evoke disgust from human on-lookers, they provide important information to group members about a female’s reproductive state. To figure out what these sexual swellings mean and whether male baboons notice, we need to look at the data.  

The goal of this Data Expedition was to introduce students to the exploration of social networks data using R. Students learned to load and plot a social network in R and then perform some basic analyses on two different networks: Hockey Fights in the National Hockey League in 2018-2019 and characters in Game of Thrones Season 3. Students used social network analysis to better understand who is connected to whom, how frequently they interact, and how they are interacting.

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.

For our Data+ project, we partnered with Rewriting the Code (RTC), a non-profit organization committed to empowering and fostering a community of college women with a passion for technology. We developed company and industry profiles for the recruitment process that included information ranging from interview and offer rate to negotiation success of salary and benefits. Additionally, we conducted text-analysis of resumes to understand the structure of an optimal tech resume and utilized linear regression to determine the influence of different variables such as ethnicity or college rank.

We utilize elements of data science and analysis in order to scour weblogs for potential malicious attacks on Duke’s servers. Additionally, we seek to identify patterns within the data that could be indicative of malicious intent and hope to apply these to real-time data.

Our team members have spent the summer working with the North Carolina Division of Public Health Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch to build a pilot environmental public health data dashboard, with the hope that the pilot tool will be used in DPH’s grant proposal to the CDC for a fully-funded tool. The pilot tool, which is a Tableau dashboard, displays population, health, and environmental data for North Carolina counties and census tracts. The project involved data processing in R, the creation of a detailed metadata table, and building interactive visualizations Tableau.

Our group aims to reveal the effects of urban and agricultural land use on metabolic productivities of rivers through statistical manipulation and visualization. During this summer, we classified sites and conducted covariate analyses based on patterns of metabolism, and produced reproducible code that can be used by researchers with similar research goals. We hope that our findings would suggest hypotheses of how disruption is caused by land development, and what factors should land planners avoid introducing.

Astronomers from the Dark Energy Survey rely on images of deep space to understand the nature of the universe, but these images are often polluted with "space junk": asteroids, comets, satellites, or other objects from our own solar system obstructing the telescope's view. In order to perform their analysis, scientists must first manually identify and mask out such objects from images, a time-consuming process. With leads Michael Troxel, Dan Scolnic, and Chris Walter, we've leveraged deep learning-based computer vision techniques to build models to automatically identify and localize space junk in deep space imagery. 

Project Lead: Dan Scolnic, Michael Troxel, Chris Walter

Click here to view the team's final project

Our team examined the relationship between race and home values across several units of analysis (household, address, HOLC rating area, census block, block group, and tract) in Durham, NC. We combined data from the decennial censuses (1940-2010), American Community Survey (2005-2018), Durham County Register of Deeds (1997-2020), and Durham County Tax Administration (1997-2021). We find that home values are strongly associated with the racial composition of areas, that homes in black neighborhoods are worth less, and that they accumulate less value over time.

This summer, our objective was to take data provided by the Durham County Detention Facility (DCDF), Duke Health, and Lincoln Community Health Center and analyze trends across the local justice system and these health care institutions, specifically in regards to individuals with mental illness. We analyzed the experience of individuals who were incarcerated by looking at their demographic characteristics, emergency department usage, and criminal justice encounters. Using these initial findings, we hope to better understand the relationship between health care utilization and rates of recidivism in Durham County during the school year through a Bass Connections Team.

Project Leads: Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, Maria Tackett

Project Manager: Ruth Wygle

Click here to view the team's final project summary

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

We apply word embedding models to corpora from the start of the Early Modern period, when the market economy began to dramatically expand in England. Word embedding models use neural networks to map vectors to words so that semantic relationships are preserved within the vectors’ geometry. Such models have been successful in understanding cultural trends and stereotypes in large corpora of texts, but these techniques are infrequently used on texts dating much farther back than the 19th century. Using newly developed methods for analyzing word embeddings, we track the development of the meanings of words related to consumerism, including their relationships with gender over time.

Duke’s enrollment data over the past 50 years speaks volumes about the evolution of the University. Using physical scans courtesy of the Duke University Archives, we manipulate decades of demographic and geospatial data across all Duke schools to create an interactive application. Giving users control over how they want to dive into the data, we hope to both illuminate questions and inspire further research into the composition of Duke’s student body--highlighting the history, origins, and people that have helped make it what it is today.

Project Leads: Don Taylor, Valerie Gillispie

Project Manager: Anna Holleman

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

The team discusses insights they have learned through looking at Duke's enrollment data since the founding of Duke:

The Disease Emergence and Richness in Primates team uses existing databases to quantify parasite richness across primates and to identify ecological predictors of parasitism. By integrating phylogenetic generalized least squares regression and network based approaches, the team ultimately aims to predict missing interactions between primates and parasites, which, combined with exploring ecological predictors, will provide better capabilities for identifying emerging infectious diseases in humans.

Project Leads: Jim Moody, Charles Nunn

Project Manager: Marie Claire Chelini

Click here to view the team's final project summary

Led by Dr. Eva Wheeler, this project considers how racial language in African American literature and film is rendered for international audiences and traces the spread of these translations. To address the study’s primary questions, the team analyzed a preliminary dataset and explored the relationship between translation strategy and different categories of racial language. The team also conducted a macro-level analysis of the linguistic, temporal, and geographic spread of African American stories using the IMDB and WorldCat databases. We have found a large amount of variation in how African American stories are rendered, which can in part be explained through a social scientific lens.

This two-week teaching module in an introductory-level undergraduate course invites students to explore the power of Twitter in shaping public discourse. The project supplements the close-reading methods that are central to the humanities with large-scale social media analysis. This exercise challenges students to consider how applying visualization techniques to a dataset too vast for manual apprehension might enable them to identify for granular inspection smaller subsets of data and individual tweets—as well as to determine what factors do not lend themselves to close-reading at all. Employing an original dataset of almost one million tweets focused on the contested 2018 Florida midterm elections, students develop skills in using visualization software, generating research questions, and creating novel visualizations to answer those questions. They then evaluate and compare the affordances of large-scale data analytics with investigation of individual tweets, and draw on their findings to debate the role of social media in shaping public conversations surrounding major national events. This project was developed as a collaboration among the English Department (Emma Davenport and Astrid Giugni), Math Department (Hubert Bray), Duke University Library (Eric Monson), and Trinity Technology Services (Brian Norberg).

Team A: Video data extraction

Alexander Bendeck (Computer Science, Statistics) and Niyaz Nurbhasha (Economics) spent ten weeks building tools to extract player and ball movement in basketball games. Using freely available broadcast-angle video footage which required much cleaning and pre-processing, the team used OpenPose software and employed neural network methodologies. Their pipeline fed into the predictive models of Team C.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Team B: Modeling basketball data: offense

Anshul Shah (Computer Science, Statistics), Jack Lichtenstein (Statistics), and Will Schmidt (Mechanical Engineering) spent ten weeks building tools to analyze offensive play in basketball. Using 2014-5 Duke Men’s Basketball player-tracking data provided by SportVU, the team constructed statistical models that explored the relationship between different metrics of offensive productivity, and also used computational geometry methods to analyze the off-ball “gravity” of an offensive player.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Team C: Modeling basketball data: defense

Lukengu Tshiteya (Statistics), Wenge Xie (ECE), and Joe Zuo (Computer Science, Statistics) spent ten weeks building tools to predict player movement in basketball games. Using SportVU data, including some pre-processed by Team A, the team built predictive RNN models that distinguish between 6 typical movement types, and created interactive visualizations of their findings in R Shiny.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Team D: Visualizing basketball data

Shixing Cao (ECE) and Jackson Hubbard (Computer Science, Statistics) spent ten weeks building visualizations to help analyze basketball games. Using player tracking data from Duke basketball games, the team created visualizations of gameflow, networks of points and assists, and integrated all of their tools into an R Shiny app.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Faculty Leads: Alexander Volfovsky, James Moody, Katherine Heller

Project Managers: Fan Bu, Heather Matthews, Harsh Parikh, Joe Zuo

Interested in understanding the types of attacks targeting Duke and other universities?  Led by OIT and the IT Security Office, students will learn to analyze threat intelligence data to identify trends and patterns of attacks.  Duke blocks an average of 1.5 billion malicious connection attempts/day and is working with other universities to share the attack data.  One untapped area is research into the types of attacks and learning how universities are targeted.  Students will collaborate alongside the security and IT professionals in analyzing the data and with the intent to discern patterns.

Project Lead: Jesse Bowling

Project Manager: Susan Jacobs

 Micalyn Struble (Computer Science, Public Policy), Xiaoqiao Xing (Economics), and Eric Zhang (Math) spent ten weeks exploring the use of neuroscience as evidence in criminal trials. Working with a large set of case files downloaded from WestLaw, the team used natural language processing to build a predictive model that has the potential to automate the process of locating relevant-to-neuroscience cases from databases.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Faculty Lead: Nita Farahany

Project Manager: William Krenzer

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 evictions, created cost-benefit models for eviction diversion efforts, and built interactive visualizations of eviction trends. They had the opportunity to consult with analytics professionals from DataWorks NC.

Project Leads: Tim Stallmann, John Killeen, Peter Gilbert

Project Manager: Libby McClure

How Much Profit is Too Much Profit?

Chris Esposito (Economics), Ruoyu Wu (Computer Science), and Sean Yoon (Masters, Decision Sciences) spent ten weeks building tools to investigate the historical trends of price gouging and excess profits taxes in the United States of America from 1900 to the present. The team used a variety of text-mining methods to create a large database of historical documents, analyzed historical patterns of word use, and created an interactive R Shiny app to display their data and analyses.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

(cartoon from The Masses July 1916)

Faculty Lead: Sarah Deutsch

Project Manager: Evan Donahue

Aidan Fitzsimmons (Public Policy, Mathematics, Electrical & Computer Engineering), Joe Choo (Mathematics, Economics) and Brooke Scheinberg (Mathematics) spent ten weeks partnering with the Durham Crisis Intervention Team, the Criminal Justice Resource Center, and the Stepping Up Initiative. Utilizing booking data of 57,346 individuals provided by the Durham County Jail, this team was able to create visualizations and predictive models that illustrate patterns of recidivism, with a focus on the subset of the population with serious mental illness (SMI). These results could assist current efforts in diverting people with SMI from the criminal justice system and into care.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Faculty Lead: Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, Michele Easter

Project Manager: Ruth Wygle

Jett Hollister (Mechanical Engineering) and Lexx Pino (Computer Science, Math) joined Economics majors Shengxi Hao and Cameron Polo in a ten week study of the late 2000s housing bubble. The team scraped, merged, and analyzed a variety of datasets to investigate different proposed causes of the bubble. They also created interactive visualizations of their data which will eventually appear on a website for public consumption.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Faculty Lead: Lee Reiners

Project Manager: Kate Coulter

This Data Expedition introduces students to network tools and approaches and invites students to consider the relationship(s) between social networks and social imaginaries. Using foundation-funding data that was collected from the The Foundation Directory Online, the Data Expedition enables students to visualize and explore the relationship between networks, social imaginaries, and funding for higher education. The Data Expedition is based on two sets of data. The first set list the grants received by Duke University in 2016 from five foundations: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The second set lists the names of board members from Duke University and each of these five foundations along with the degree granting institution for their undergraduate education. For the sake of this exercise, the degree granting institutions data was fabricated from a randomized list of the top twenty-five undergraduate institutions.

This data expedition explores the local (ego) patent citation networks of three hybrid vehicle-related patents. The concept of patent citations and technological development is a core theme in innovation and entrepreneurship, and the purpose of these network explorations is to both quantitatively and visually assess how innovations are connected and what these connections mean for the focal innovations and the technologies that draw on those patents in the future. The expedition was incorporated as part of the Sociology of Entrepreneurship class, where students are thinking about the emergence and diffusion of innovations.

This Data Expedition introduced hypothesis-driven data analysis in R and the concept of circular data, while providing some tools for importing it and analyzing it in R.

Statistical Science majors Eidan Jacob and Justina Zou joined forces with math major Mason Simon built interactive tools that analyze and visualize the trajectories taken by wireless devices as they move across Duke’s campus and connect to its wireless network. They used de-identified data provided by Duke’s Office of Information Technology, and worked closely with professionals from that office.

Click here for the Executive Summary

A team of students led by Professors Jonathan Mattingly and Gregory Herschlag will investigate gerrymandering in political districting plans.  Students will improve on and employ an algorithm to sample the space of compliant redistricting plans for both state and federal districts.  The output of the algorithm will be used to detect gerrymandering for a given district plan; this data will be used to analyze and study the efficacy of the idea of partisan symmetry.  This work will continue the Quantifying Gerrymandering project, seeking to understand the space of redistricting plans and to find justiciable methods to detect gerrymandering. The ideal team has a mixture of members with programing backgrounds (C, Java, Python), statistical experience including possibly R, mathematical and algorithmic experience, and exposure to political science or other social science fields.

Read the latest updates about this ongoing project by visiting Dr. Mattingly's Gerrymandering blog.

Samantha Garland (Computer Science), Grant Kim (Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering), and Preethi Seshadri (Data Science) spent ten weeks exploring factors that influence patient choices when faced with intermediate-stage prostate cancer diagnoses. They used topic modeling in an analysis of a large collection of clinical appointment transcripts.

Click here for the Executive Summary

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).

Click here to read the Executive Summary

In tracing the publication history, geographical spread, and content of “pirated” copies of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gabriel Guedes (Math, Global Cultural Studies), Lucian Li (Computer Science, History), and Orgil Batzaya (Math, Computer Science) explored the complications of looking at a data set that saw drastic changes over the last three centuries in terms of spelling and grammar, which offered new challenges to data cleanup. By asking questions of the effectiveness of “distant reading” techniques for comparing thousands of different editions of Robinson Crusoe, the students learned how to think about the appropriateness of myriad computational methods like doc2vec and topic modeling. Through these methods, the students started to ask, at what point does one start seeing patterns that were invisible at a human scale of reading (reading one book at a time)? While the project did not definitively answer these questions, it did provide paths for further inquiry.

The team published their results at: https://orgilbatzaya.github.io/pirating-texts-site/

Click here for the Executive Summary

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.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Maddie Katz (Global Health and Evolutionary Anthropology Major), Parker Foe (Math/Spanish, Smith College), and Tony Li (Math, Cornell) spent ten weeks analyzing data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Their goal was to understand how the discrimination faced by the trans community is realized on a state, regional, and national level, and to partner with advocacy organizations around their analysis.

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.

Xinyu (Cindy) Li (Biology and Chemistry) and Emilie Song (Biology) spent ten weeks exploring the Black Queen Hypothesis, which predicts that co-operation in animal societies could be a result of genetic/functional trait losses, as well as polymorphism of workers in eusocial animals such as ants and termites. The goal was to investigate this idea in four different eusocial insect species.

Matthew Newman (Sociology), Sonia Xu (Statistics), and Alexandra Zrenner (Economics) spent ten weeks exploring giving patterns and demographic characteristics of anonymized Duke donors. They worked closely with the Duke Alumni Affairs and Development Office, with the goal of understanding the data and constructing tools to generate data-driven insight about donor behavior.

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 and crisis intervention techniques.

Lauren Fox (Cultural Anthropology) and Elizabeth Ratliff (Statistics, Global Health) spent ten weeks analyzing and mapping pedestrian, bicycle, and motor vehicle data provided by Durham's Department of Transportation. This project was a continuation of a seminar on "ghost bikes" taught by Prof. Harris Solomon.

Liuyi Zhu (Computer Science, Math), Gilad Amitai (Masters, Statistics), Raphael Kim (Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering), and Andreas Badea (East Chapel Hill High School) spent ten weeks streamlining and automating the process of electronically rejuvenating medieval artwork. They used a 14th-century altarpiece by Francescussio Ghissi as a working example.

Zijing Huang (Statistics, Finance), Artem Streltsov (Masters Economics), and Frank Yin (ECE, CompSci, Math) spent ten weeks exploring how Internet of Things (IoT) data could be used to understand potential online financial behavior. They worked closely with analytical and strategic personnel from TD Bank, who provided them with a massive dataset compiled by Epsilon, a global company that specializes in data-driven marketing.

Over ten weeks, Public Policy major Amy Jiang and Mathematics and Computer Science major Kelly Zhang joined forces with Economics Masters student Amirhossein Khoshro to investigate academic hiring patterns across American universities, as well as analyzing the educational background of faculty. They worked closely with Academic Analytics, a provider of data and solutions for universities in the U.S. and the U.K.

Anne Driscoll (Economics, Statistical Science), and Austin Ferguson (Math, Physics) spent ten weeks examining metrics for inter-departmental cooperativity and productivity, and developing a collaboration network of Duke faculty. This project was sponsored by the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Award, with the larger goal of promoting collaborative success in the School of Medicine and School of Nursing.

Students in the Performance and Technology Class create a series of performances that explore the interface between society and our machines. With the theme of the cloud to guide them, they have created increasingly complex art using digital media, microcontrollers, and motion tracking. Their work will be on display at the Duke Choreolab 2016.

This project transforms an inaccessible audio archive of historic North Carolina folk music colllected by Frank Clyde Brown in the 1920s-40s into a vital, publicly accessible digital archive and museum exhibition. 

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has an established reputation as a useful data analysis technique in numerous applications. However, its usage in practical situations is undergoing challenges in recent years.The fundamental factor to this is the increasingly growing size of the datasets available and needed in the information sciences. To address this, in this work we propose to use structured random compression, that is, random projections that exploit the data structure, for two NMF variants: classical and separable. In separable NMF (SNMF) the left factors are a subset of the columns of the input matrix. We present suitable formulations for each problem, dealing with different representative algorithms within each one.

Kelsey Sumner, EvAnth and Global Health major and Christopher Hong, CompSci/ECE major, spent ten weeks analyzing high-dimensional microRNA data taken from patients with viral and/or bacterial conditions. They worked closely with the medical faculty and practitioners who generated the data.