World-Wide Big Data

Behind the scenes of every action movie, in every hospital and in every weather station, there is a computer scientist: coding to create special effects, analyzing big data to improve efficacy of patient treatment, and using machine learning to predict the daily weather. Computer science is everywhere, and the Machine Learning and Big Data Creative Inquiry project, led by Dr. Melissa Smith and Ben Shealy, a graduate student, both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is making the field more accessible to students while emphasizing its impact in the world.

This project began in 2016, but this year Smith piloted Clemson’s first International Virtual Exchange Creative Inquiry project by partnering with An-Najah National University in Palestine. The Clemson team and students from An-Najah met weekly to discuss their projects which helped Tasneem Khalil, a senior computer engineering major at An-Najah, gain experience in machine learning and big data which she hopes will make her a more valuable member of the workforce post-graduation. “It was a special chance to improve in this field and experience something new with new people,” Khalil said. The project had some challenges—for instance the team’s meeting time was bedtime in Palestine. However, the Clemson Creative Inquiry students were so impressed by Khalil’s dedication and hard work that they were determined to make the collaboration work and make it the best experience that they could for their international team members.

To familiarize students with coding and data, Shealy introduced them to the open-source platform Jupyter Notebook which provides interactive computational modules and lessons to prepare students for using coding, big data analysis and machine learning for research.

“When we talk about big data, we mean hundreds of thousands, even millions, of data entries in Excel. That’s infeasible for humans to look over and analyze, so you need statistical methods of looking at this data,” Mikaila Gossman, a computer engineering graduate student that works with the Creative Inquiry students, said. The Jupyter Notebook materials prepare students to analyze big data and code on their own. This preparation allowed students on the Creative Inquiry team to work on an array of research projects from using climate data to inform meteorological predictions to advanced coding to create two-dimensional animations. Perhaps these students will be the next computer scientists behind the action scene in the latest movie or weather report on the national news or hospital efficacy in Palestine.