On Monday, December 7, thirty MBS Analytics students presented some amazing posters as part of their Advanced Analytics Practicum course taught by Dr. Christie Nelson.
Throughout the semester, students had the opportunity to gain professional and technical experience by working on projects using real-world data to solve specific business problems for MBS industry partners representing a wide range of sectors including healthcare, software development, music, transportation, and safety.
Split into 13 teams among ten companies, students worked under the dual guidance of company mentors and MBS academic advisors. Each of the teams did an amazing job visually summarizing their results from complex application of different algorithms and tools onto a poster, whey they presented to the audience in under five minutes. The event—which was virtually attended by the mentors from partner companies, students from MBS and beyond, and MBS faculty and staff—was engaging, full of activity, and questions were constantly flowing during the live Q&A.
The event was virtually attended by mentors from partner companies, students from MBS and beyond, and MBS faculty and staff—it was fun, engaging, and full of sharp questions from the audience!
After the MBS advisors gave an introduction that described how students overcame data challenges, the presentations began with the two teams who worked with mentors from Janssen. The presentation for Janssen Team 1 included Devam Shah, Aparna Narayanan, Arshiya Verma; Janssen Team 2, which included students Ryan Maiorano and Nixon Patel, followed with their presentation. Both teams did a great job capturing the use of application of regression and machine-learning algorithms to predict different aspects of the clinical trial process and application of AI to complex data set of project management.
Next, Vraj Patel and Jonathan Zhu presented their project for CCICADA (the Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis), which is a US Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence. In their significant and innovative analysis, the team conducted a sentiment analysis on Tweets of politicians and News sources to find the influence that social media has on opinions about spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Vraj and Jonathan’s poster on application of sentiment analysis to find influence of social media on COVID-19.
Zhuo Zhang, Betty Yuan and the two teams who worked with NJ TRANSIT presented their findings on NJT’s past grant application performance, and made recommendations on private foundation grant opportunities based on a data visualization and analysis. Adding to the diversity of projects, the BMI team—including Drashti Patel, Radhika Patel and Kahini Amin—presented a poster to identify the attributes that contribute to a song becoming a hit. They did not just work with the mentors from the company and MBS advisors, but also students and advisors from the MBS Externship Exchange. Behrad Saleh and team discussed their work with the Federal Railroad Administration and how they learned GIS software (poster below).
Behrad Saleh and Trevor Johnson’s poster to study trespassing accidents.
Maher Arora and team discussed their work regarding a hotspot analysis for the Federal Transit Administration, which sought to tackle growing concerns of human trafficking by determining locations where most incidents occur. Additional presentations included Lizi and Hongying’s work with a software company and how they overcame some data challenges. More teams presented equally amazing projects including work for companies such as State Street and how they were able to use publicly available data sets from organizations including the New York City Police Department and Airbnb. Students applied new technologies, gained industry exposure, and came up with unique and useful insights and make significant impact to the organizations for which they worked.
Overall, it was a wonderful, engaging event and each team did a fabulous job! We thank Dr. Nelson and the MBS faculty and staff for their support, and, as always, sincerely thank the 61 partner organizations which provide MBS students with opportunities like these, which allow us to gain professional experience and knowledge from solving real world-problems using innovative applications.