BU Spark! Sources Projects for CS506

Launched this January, BU Spark! is already contributing to the student experience at BU. As one its first projects, the new initiative worked to source real-world projects for CS 506 (Spring 2017 section) students to work on.

CS 506, or “Computational Tools for Data Science,” covers practical skills in working with data and introduces a wide range of techniques that are commonly used in the analysis of data, such as clustering, classification, regression, and network analysis. Led by CS associate professor, Evimaria Terzi, the course emphasizes hands-on application of methods via programming, which makes these real-world projects crucial to achieving learning objectives.

BU Spark! director, Ziba Cranmer, partnered with Terzi to source a variety of projects both from within BU and from external collaborators. One project brings Betty Anderson, associate professor of history and director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, together with students who are working to help map commercial activity in Amman, Jordan using data from TripAdvisor. The involvement of CS 506 students is helping Anderson expand the scope of her work in an effort to understand both how Jordanians are projecting class, gender, and consumption decisions and how the state and business owners are generating customers.

Jessica Simes, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, is also tapping into the talents of CS 506. Simes is working with students to map crime data with pediatric sleeping patterns in the Philadelphia metro area. As she notes, the “BU Spark! partnership [provides] an opportunity to aggregate publicly-available crime data to examine local conditions of neighborhood crime.” Her hope is that the dataset can become useful to other researchers who are “interested in neighborhood inequality and the social determinants of health.”

Through collaborative efforts such as this, BU Spark! continues to develop unique opportunities for students to apply classroom knowledge to real-world challenges. BU Spark! is an initiative to support student-driven innovation and entrepreneurship in computer science, computer engineering, and related disciplines. Housed at the Hariri Institute for Computing, BU Spark! aims to help students realize their entrepreneurial potential by providing access to resources, knowledge, and expert networks to support their innovation journeys.