Events on campus yield big data with new mobile app

College events have for decades been advertised through bulletin boards in residence halls and at intersections of sidewalks that wind through campus.

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Campuses have found myriad ways to leverage Big Data.

A new mobile app is being piloted at several campuses with a goal of replacing those bulletin boards, and providing administrators with something cork and paper never could: data.

Appropriately named after another common campus advertising spot, Campus Quad lets students, faculty, and administrators create and share flyers, post classifieds, and communicate with one another.

“The whole idea is that it is one space for all the things that a student cares about,” said Frances Cairns, founder and CEO of Campus Quad. “It’s one place to see everything and explore everything that’ happening on campus.”…Read More

Improving student feedback with Big Data

A private Australian university is using analytics to better understand the massive amounts of student feedback collected by faculty members every semester.

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Analytics tools could also save time for educators.

Officials at Bond University, a private institution in Queensland, Australia, announced in October that the school would use an advanced analytics tool to sift through student evaluation forms and determine the most pressing issues among the campus population.

The university is using a tool called EvaluationKIT, an online system designed to provide better, more accurate insight into how to improve college courses.

Faculty can select questions placed on a student evaluation form and ask EvaluationKIT to summarize the comments.The analytics tool lets educators identify important themes in the evaluation forms, instead of shuffling through dozens or hundreds of forms in search of a common theme.…Read More

Big data still in its infancy but skills are short

A survey of UK companies identifies the skills that businesses are seeking for big data projects but says they remain in short supply, TechRepublic reports.

While the proportion of firms using big data analytics remains relatively small recruiters are finding it difficult to source the talent they need.

Of the more than 1,000 firms polled by IT skills body e-skills UK just one in five are implementing or plan to implement a big data analytics scheme.

But more than half of recruitment firms hiring people for big data-related roles in the UK reported they had difficulty finding people with the necessary skills and experience.…Read More

When Big Data goes bad

Big Data and the cloud are putting supercomputer capabilities into everyone’s hands. But what’s getting lost in the mix is that the tools we use to interpret and apply this tidal wave of information often have a fatal flaw, CNN reports.

Much of the data analysis we do rests on erroneous models, meaning mistakes are inevitable. And when our outsized expectations exceed our capacity, the consequences can be dire.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if Big Data wasn’t so very, very big. But the amount of data that we have access to is enabling us to use even flawed models to produce what are often useful results. The trouble is that we’re frequently confusing those results for omniscience.…Read More

What is ‘Big Data,’ anyway?

“Big data”—the large data sets that can be managed and analyzed only by increasingly powerful and sophisticated tools—is an expansive and rapidly evolving field, Forbes reports.

For now, I’m not going to talk about internally generated information that companies use primarily to mine for operational and financial efficiency or the increasing amount of data that machines can generate to indicate that they need servicing, that they are out of an item, and so on. This is fascinating stuff, but beyond the scope of this blog.

Yet even “limiting” ourselves to customer-oriented data barely shrinks the field. So for my inaugural post, my colleagues and I have created a taxonomy to help us get beyond generalities like big data, zero in on the most useful information, and point out how it can help companies get to new insights.…Read More

Big Data brain drain

Big data is everywhere in science today, opening new insights in fields from astrophysics to zoology, Science Careers reports.

For all its promise, though, big data also poses a real danger to academic science, warns Jake VanderPlas, a postdoc in astronomy and computer science at the University of Washington, in an illuminating essay on his Pythonic Perambulations blog. Specifically, VanderPlas believes that universities have to change their reward system or risk losing the very people whose expertise makes big-data research possible.

“Where scientific research is concerned, this recently accelerated shift to data-centric science has a dark side, which boils down to this: the skills required to be a successful scientific researcher are increasingly indistinguishable from the skills required to be successful in industry,” VanderPlas writes. “While academia, with typical inertia, gradually shifts to accommodate this, the rest of the world has already begun to embrace and reward these skills to a much greater degree. The unfortunate result is that some of the most promising upcoming researchers are finding no place for themselves in the academic community, while the for-profit world of industry stands by with deep pockets and open arms.” (Note that the emphasis is in the original.)…Read More

Don’t be fooled into thinking that big data just relies on technology

As big data becomes increasingly popular, it’s occasionally worth taking a step back to think about what companies are looking to achieve as well as the necessary elements, The Guardian reports.

Is investment in new technology really necessary, for example, if there is a cheaper – and ultimately simpler – means of collecting the required information?

Reza Soudagar, writing for multinational software company SAP, eloquently summarised how cost-effective ‘low-tech’ methods can be implemented to collect big data, citing the example of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Housed in Cevahir Bedesten, customers are not asked traditional questions (“Do you need any help?”) but are pressed on more personal matters, such as which country shoppers are from, the duration of their trip and even which hotel (or area) they are staying in.…Read More

Putting the bite on crime with predictive policing

Imagine thwarting a crime even before it occurs by predicting when and where it will happen. Shades of the 2002 Tom Cruise futuristic action thriller Minority Report? Well, in a way yes, IT World Canada reports.

No ‘precogs” are being tethered to a computer yet, but some police agencies south of the border are experimenting with analytics technologies and what is being called predictive policing.

For example, for the last seven years the PredPol algorithm developed by a team of mathematicians and social scientists at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Santa Clara and UC Irvine, has been analyzing crime incident information to some members of the Los Angeles Police predict where certain types of property-related crimes are most likely to happen during certain police patrol shifts.…Read More

Colleges are using Big Data to predict which students will do well

Students at America’s high schools, colleges, and universities are well into their first semesters, Fast Company reports. But while they plow through their assigned readings and write essays, administrators are turning their grades and their professors’ evaluations into millions upon millions of tiny data points.

Much like every other field in the world, education is embracing big data–only, this time, they’re using it to determine who will thrive in college, who will fail, and who will need some extra help.

David Wright is Wichita State University‘s (WSU) Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. In his position, Wright is responsible for overseeing the vast amounts of data WSU uses to track student and faculty performance. Like a growing number of American educational institutions, Wichita State uses predictive analysis tools to optimize their offerings and steer help to students who need it.…Read More

Big data’s big price tag

“Creeping commercialisation” of ‘big data’ may force university researchers to pool their resources, a Queensland media and cultural studies specialist has warned, The Australian reports.

Queensland University of Technology commentator Axel Bruns said social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were limiting access to “application programming interfaces”, the underpinning software that makes it easier for researchers to analyse their data.

This, combined with the emergence of social media data resellers, was preventing researchers from making a “considered choice” about whether to use bigger or smaller datasets.…Read More

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