Research

Research projects at Rhodes iiD focus on building connections. We encourage crosspollination of ideas across disciplines, and to develop new forms of collaboration that will advance research and education across the full spectrum of disciplines at Duke. The topics below show areas of research focus at Rhodes iiD. See all of our research.

Visualizing Twitter: Public Discourse and the 2018 Florida Midterm Election Recounts

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).

Queens of Antiquity

Understanding how to generate, analyze, and work with datasets in the humanities is often a difficult task without learning how to code or program. In humanities centered courses, we often privilege close reading or qualitative analysis over other methods of knowing, but by learning some new quantitative techniques we better prepare the students to tackle new forms of reading. This class will work with the data from the HathiTrust to develop ideas for thinking about how large groups and different discourse communities thought of queens of antiquity like Cleopatra and Dido.

Please refer to https://sites.duke.edu/queensofantiquity/ for more information.

Basketball analytics pipeline---from raw video to dynamic visualization

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

Network Visualization of IoT devices

Bernice Meja (Philosophy, Physics), Jessica Yang (Computer Science, ECE), and Tracey Chen (Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering) spent ten weeks building methods for Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) to better understand information arising from “smart” (IoT) devices on campus. Working with data provided by an IoT testbed set up by OIT professionals, the team used a mixture of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning techniques and built a prototype device classifier.

 

Click here ot read the Executive Summary

 

Project Lead: Will Brockselsby

Security Threat Intelligence Analytics

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

Breaking the Bundle: Analyzing Duke’s Journal Subscriptions

Cathy Lee (Statistics) and Jennifer Zheng (Math, Emory University) spent ten weeks building tools to help Duke University Libraries better understand its journal purchasing practice. Using a combination of web-scraping and data-merging algorithms, the team created a dashboard to help library strategists visualize and optimize journal selection.

 

Click here to read the Executive Summary

 

 

 

 

Faculty Leads: Angela Zoss, Jeff Kosokoff

Project Manager: Chi Liu

Neuroscience in the Courtroom

 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

Remembering the Middle Passage

A team of students will use a variety of data sets and mapping technologies to determine a feasible location for a deep-sea memorial to the transatlantic slave trade. While scholars have studied the overall mortality of the slave trade, little is known about where these deaths occurred. New mapping technologies can begin to supply this data. Led by English professor Charlotte Sussman, in association with the Representing Migrations Humanities Lab, this team will create a new database that combines previously-disparate data and archival sources to discover where on their journeys enslaved persons died, and then to visualize these journeys. This project will employ the resources of digital technologies as well as the humanistic methods of history, literature, philosophy, and other disciplines. The project welcomes students from a broad range of disciplines: computer science; mathematics; English and literature; history; African and African American studies; philosophy; art history; visual and media studies; geography; climatology; and ocean science.

 

Image credit:

J.M.W. Turner, Slave Ship, 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (public domain)

Faculty Lead: Charlotte Sussman

Project Manager: Emma Davenport

Durham Evictions

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

 

Human Rights in the Postwar World

The American public first encountered the term “genocide” in a Washington Post op-ed published in 1944; since then, the word’s meaning has been circulated, debated, and shaped by numerous forces, especially by words and images in newspapers. With the support of Dr. Priscilla Wald (English), a team of students led by Nora Nunn (English graduate student) and Astrid Giugni (English and ISS) will analyze how U.S. mass media—particularly newspapers—enlist text and imagery such as press photographs to portray genocide, human rights, and crimes against humanity from World War II to the present. From the Holocaust to Cambodia, from Rwanda to Myanmar, such representation has political consequences. If time allows, students will also study the representation of collective violence in Hollywood film, querying the relationship between human rights and genre. The implications of these findings could inform future coverage of human rights-related issues at home and abroad.

Faculty Leads: Nora Nunn, Astrid Giugni

U.S. Ambivalence About Making Profits

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

Optimizing Risk Assessment for Duke University Student Athlete Injury Prevention

Maria Henriquez (Computer Science, Statistics) and Jacob Sumner (Biology) spent ten weeks building tools to help the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Lab best utilize its data from Duke University student athletes. The team worked with a large collection of athlete strength, balance, and flexibility measurements collected by the lab. They improved the K Lab’s data pipeline, created a predictive model for injury risk, and developed interactive web-based individualized injury risk reports.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Faculty Lead: Dr. Tim Sell
Project Manager: Brinnae Bent

 

 

Recidivism in the Durham County Jail

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

Invisible Adaptations: From Hamlet to the Avengers

Have you ever read or watched a movie and realized that you have seen the same story before?  How do you know if you are watching an adaptation? A team of students led by UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Grant Glass, will develop means to track the movement of adaptations within contemporary culture through machine learning techniques. Drawing upon a variety of textual information drawn from historical and digital sources, the project team will have the opportunity to work with many different types of data. Students will identify features of different master narratives, which will be used to demonstrate how certain stories are modified and retold over and over again. By creating this training dataset, the team will use algorithms to identify adaptations in previously unidentified works. This will allow scholars to better understand at scale how certain narratives are adapted into new stories and forms.

Faculty Lead: Grant Glass

Project Manager: TBD

American Predatory Lending & the Global Financial Crisis

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

Speech Emotion Analysis

Andre Wang (Math, Statistics), Michael Xue (Computer Science, ECE), and Ryan Culhane (Computer Science) spent ten weeks exploring the role played by emotion in speech-focused machine-learning. The team used a variety of techniques to build emotion recognition pipelines, and incorporated emotion into generated speech during text-to-speech synthesis.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

 

Faculty Leads: Vahid Tarokh, Jie Ding

Project Manager: Enmao Diao

Networks, Higher Education, and Social Imaginaries

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.

Exploring Poverty with Principal Component Analysis

This Data Expedition seeks to introduce students to statistical analysis in the field of international development. Students construct a index of wealth/poverty based on asset holdings using four datasets collected under the umbrella of the Living Standards Measurement Survey project at the World Bank. We selected countries to represent different continents with comparable and recent survey data: Bulgaria (2007), Tajikistan (2009), Tanzania (2010-2011), and Panama (2008).

First, we construct an index of wealth based on household assets in the different countries using Principle Components Analysis. Once a poverty index is constructed, students seek to understand what the main drivers of wealth/poverty are in different countries. We include variables for health, education, age, relationship to the household head, and sex. Students then use regression analysis to identify the main drivers of poverty in different countries.

Exploring Patent Networks Using U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Records

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.

To Catch a Thief (with Data!)

Our aim was to introduce students to the wealth of possibilities that human genotyping and sequencing hold by illustrating firsthand the power of these datasets to identify genetic relatives, using the story of the Golden State Killer’s capture with public genetic databases.

Answering Biological Questions Using Circular Data and Analysis in R

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.

Co-Curricular Technology Pathways e-advisor

Alec Ashforth (Economics/Math), Brooke Keene (Electrical & Computer Engineering), Vincent Liu (Electrical & Computer Engineering), and Dezmanique Martin (Computer Science) spent ten weeks helping Duke’s Office of Information Technology explore the development of an “e-advisor” app that recommends co-curricular opportunities to students based on a variety of factors. The team used collaborative and content-based filtering to create a recommender-system prototype in R Shiny.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Duke Wireless Data

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

Data and Technology for Fact-Checking

Lucas Fagan (Computer Science/Public Policy), Caroline Wang (Computer Science/Math), and Ethan Holland (Statistics/Computer Science) spent ten weeks understanding how data science can contribute to fact-checking methodology. Training on audio data from major news stations, they adapted OpenAI methods to develop a pipeline that moves from audio data to an interface that enables users to search for claims related to other claims that had been previously investigated by fact-checking websites.

This project will continue into the academic year via Bass Connections.

Click here to read the Executive Summary.

Gerrymandering and the Extent of Democracy in America

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.

Social Determinants of Health

Kimberly Calero (Public Policy/Biology/Chemistry), Alexandra Diaz (Biology/Linguistics), and Cary Shindell (Environmental Engineering) spent ten weeks analyzing and visualizing data about disparities in Social Determinants of Health. Working with data provided by the MURDOCK Study, the American Community Survey, and the Google Places API, the team built a dataset and visualization tool that will assist the MURDOCK research team in exploring health outcomes in Cabarrus County, NC.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Complex Decisions, Real Numbers: Medical Decision-Making

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

Women's Spaces

Nathan Liang (Psychology, Statistics), Sandra Luksic (Philosophy, Political Science),and Alexis Malone (Statistics) began their 10-week project as an open-ended exploration how women are depicted both physically and figuratively in women's magazines, seeking to consider what role magazines play in the imagined and real lives of women.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Visualizing the Lives of Orphaned and Separated Children

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

How do we build and grow a PTA?

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

Pirating Texts

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

Poverty in Writing & Images

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 affect policy change. As Michelle Gao explained, “The statistical methods we used provided another more quantitative way of analyzing the text. The database had around 130,000 documents, which is pretty impossible to read one by one and get all the poverty related documents by brute force. As a result, web-scraping and word filtering provided a more efficient and systematic way of extracting all the valuable information while minimizing human errors.” Through techniques such as linear regression, machine learning, and image analysis, the team effectively analyzed large swaths of textual and visual data. This approach allowed them to zero in on significant documents for closer and more in-depth analysis, paying particular attention to documents by presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, both leaders in what LBJ famously called “The War on Poverty.”

Click Here for the Executive Summary

Analytical Exploration for Duke Development

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

Mental Health Interventions by the Durham Police (Year 2)

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 by the Sheriff’s Office of Durham County.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

Transgender Discrimination Survey

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.

Data-driven Parking

ECE majors Mitchell Parekh and Yehan (Morton) Mo, along with IIT student Nikhil Tank, spent ten weeks understanding parking behavior at Duke. They worked closely with the Parking and Transportation Office, as well as with Vice President for Administration Kyle Cavanaugh.

Workforce Incentives

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.

Fruit Fly Morphogenesis

BME major Neel Prabhu, along with CompSci and ECE majors Virginia Cheng and Cheng Lu, spent ten weeks studying how cells from embryos of the common fruit fly move and change in shape during development. They worked with Cell-Sheet-Tracker (CST), an algorithm develped by former Data+ student Roger Zou and faculty lead Carlo Tomasi. This algorithm uses computer vision to model and track a dynamic network of cells using a deformable graph.

Black Queen Hypothesis

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.

Learning to Search More Deeply

Weiyao Wang (Math) and Jennifer Du , along with NCCU Physics majors Jarrett Weathersby and Samuel Watson, spent ten weeks learning about how search engines often provide results which are not representative in terms of race and/or gender. Working closely with entrepreneur Winston Henderson, their goal was to understand how to frame this problem via statistical and machine-learning methodology, as well as to explore potential solutions.

Data-driven Development

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.

Smart(er) Routing at Theme Parks

Runliang Li (Math), Qiyuan Pan (Computer Science), and Lei Qian (Masters in Statistics and Economic Modelling) spent ten weeks investigating discrepancies between posted wait times and actual wait times for rides at Disney World. They worked with data provided by TouringPlans.

Mental Health Interventions by Durham Police

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.

Alumni Gifts and Data Analysis

Building off the work of a 2016 Data+ team, Yu Chen (Economics), Peter Hase (Statistics), and Ziwei Zhao (Mathematics), spent ten weeks working closely with analytical leadership at Duke's Office of University Development. The project goal was to identify distinguishing characteristics of major alumni donors and to model their lifetime giving behavior.

Ghost Bikes

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.

Comparing the Exploration of Academic Majors at Duke

Over ten weeks, Math/CompSci majors Benjamin Chesnut and Frederick Xu joined forces with International Comparative Studies major Katharyn Loweth to understand the myriad academic pathways traveled by undergraduate students at Duke. They focused on data from Mathematics and the Duke Global Health Institute, and worked closely with departmental leadership from both areas.

Smart-phone-assisted digital rejuvenation of medieval paintings

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.

Understanding Duke Research Based on Large-Scale Faculty Publication Records

John Benhart (CompSci, Math) and Esko Brummel (Masters in Bioethics and Science Policy) spent ten weeks analyzing current and potential scholarly collaborations within the community of Duke faculty. They worked closely with the leadership of the Scholars@Duke database.

Online Financial Behavior and the Internet of Things

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.

Marriage and Statistics through Space and Time

Over ten weeks, Mathematics/Economics majors Khuong (Lucas) Do and Jason Law joined forces with Analytical Political Economy Masters student Feixiao Chen to analyze the spati-temporal distribution of birth addresses in North Carolina. The goal of the project was to understand how/whether the distributions of different demographic categories (white/black, married/unmarried, etc.) differed, and how these differences connected to a variety of socioeconomic indicators.

Analytics for Faculty Success

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.

Baseball Analytics with Statcast

Graduate Student: Jacob Coleman, 3rd year Ph.D. student in Statistical Science

Faculty Instructor: Colin Rundel

Class: STA 112, Data Science

Team Science

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.

Geometry and Topology for Data

Computer Science majors Erin Taylor and Ian Frankenburg, along with Math major Eric Peshkin, spent ten weeks understanding how geometry and topology, in tandem with statistics and machine-learning, can aid in quantifying anomalous behavior in cyber-networks. The team was sponsored by Geometric Data Anaytics, Inc., and used real anonymized Netflow data provided by Duke's Information Technology Security Office.

Machine Society Interfaces

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.

Dig@IT: Virtual Reality in Archaeology

A virtual reality system to recreate the archaeological experience using data and 3D models from the neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, in Anatolia, Turkey. 

Archives Alive: The North Carolina Jukebox Project

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. 

Interactive environmental data applications

Molly Rosenstein, an Earth and Ocean Sciences major and Tess Harper, an Environmental Science and Spanish major spent ten weeks developing interactive data applications for use in Environmental Science 101, taught by Rebecca Vidra.

Compressed Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Is Fast and Accurate

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.

Risky Decision-Making

Ethan Levine, Annie Tang, and Brandon Ho spent ten weeks investigating whether personality traits can be used to predict how people make risky decisions. They used a large dataset collected by the lab of Prof. Scott Huettel, and were mentored by graduate students Emma Wu Dowd and Jonathan Winkle.

Quantifying the Science-Humanities Gap

Spenser Easterbrook, a Philosophy and Math double major, joined Biology majors Aharon Walker and Nicholas Branson in a ten-week exploration of the connections between journal publications from the humanities and the sciences. They were guided by Rick Gawne and Jameson Clarke, graduate students from Philosophy and Biology.

Constructing Challenges from Duke MOOC data

The goal of this project is take a large amount of data from the Massive Open Online Courses offered by Duke professors, and produce from it a coherent and compelling data analysis challenge that might then be used for a Duke or nation-wide data analysis competition.

microRNA Host Response to Infection

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.

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