Faculty mentors wanted for corporate partnership projects in The Data Mine

The Data Mine is seeking faculty mentors to work with students in the Corporate Partnerships Learning Community. In this learning community, interdisciplinary teams of students propose data-driven solutions to a real-world problem posed by a corporate partner. Faculty mentors complement guidance provided by the corporate partner and often find beneficial features for their own work.

Faculty mentors are asked to join their students in a weekly meeting with their corporate mentor and to provide feedback and guidance as needed. All legal and logistical aspects of the project are facilitated by The Data Mine staff, and all meetings will be online for the Spring 2021 semester. The expected commitment is roughly one-two hours a week. Faculty may apply as a mentor for the Spring 2021 semester and/or the 2021-22 academic year.

Benefits for faculty include the opportunity to create corporate relationships, to see how data science is being used in industry and to mentor highly motivated students with bright futures in a variety of fields. Several projects in the Corporate Partnership Learning Community have resulted in sponsored research for faculty, and representatives say opportunities for corporate-academic connections are continuing to grow.

The Data Mine is a collective of 17 learning communities and is a part of Purdue’s Integrative Data Science Initiative. In learning communities, students share courses, projects and living spaces in an effort to build multiple layers of academic and social support.

Each community in The Data Mine introduces students to concepts of data science that will help them engage with real-world problems faced by a specific field of study. In the 2020-21 academic year, The Data Mine has brought together more than 400 students to work on 30 projects for more than 20 corporate partners.

Student teams take an interdisciplinary approach to the problem and data provided by their corporate partner. Methods have included visual data representation, natural language processing, augmented reality programs and social media analysis to address topics such as drug discovery, supply chain and logistics, user interface and customer experience. An archive of past projects, as well as posters and video presentations of projects completed during the 2019-20 academic year, is available online.

Faculty interested in becoming a Corporate Partnership Learning Community faculty mentor are encouraged to email Mark Daniel Ward, director of The Data Mine and professor of statistics, at mdw@purdue.edu.

Writer: Christy McCarter, mccarter@purdue.edu