WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

WIN 2013

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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Advancing WPI every freshman—approximately 1,000 students—can beneƂt from this distinctive learning experience. The Davis Foundation funds will enable WPI to develop necessary course support materials and a robust annual assessment of the program, the faculty teaching the courses, and the impact on students to ensure the effectiveness of the seminars. "We also hope that through the Great Problems Seminars, our students see their education not just as a pathway to a job but a pathway to a purpose, that they begin to understand that they can Ƃnd a career where they can make a difference," Wobbe adds. She cites one student team whose seminar project focused on developing a business plan for a woman in Kenya who wanted to start a soap-making business. A year-and-a-half later, Wobbe notes, the students traveled to Kenya on their own to help her implement the plan. Student teams have been invited to present their work to municipal committees, and others have obtained provisional patents for devices they've created through the seminars. Quantitatively, assessment of learning over the Ƃrst Ƃve years shows that students who participated in the Great Problems Seminars are more engaged with current events and societal and human needs, are more information literate, showed improved teamwork skills, and had more opportunity to present and defend opinions and intellectual work. Importantly, these students also reported a stronger perception of the connections between social issues and science and technology. Some graduates also credit their post-college success to their early participation in the Great Problems Seminars. "The students aren't necessarily going to solve the world's problems in these classes," says Wobbe, "but it's clear to me from the stories of transformation that I hear from our students that this program is preparing our bright, talented young people to be effective contributors to solutions for our great problems in the future." The Gift of Insight USING DATA TO inspire new ideas. This is the goal of a new Analytics Lab co-founded by Brenton Faber, professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of Humanities and Arts, and Andrew Trapp and Renata Konrad, assistant professors in WPI's School of Business. The lab has received start-up grant funds, training, and software valued in excess of $350,000 from Dimensional Insight, a business intelligence Ƃrm in Burlington, Mass. "We are grateful for the support of Dimensional Insight, and we look forward to developing a vibrant laboratory that attracts students and faculty from a wide range of Ƃelds who want to learn and apply the techniques of data mining, business intelligence, and analytics to their work," said WPI Dean of Arts and Sciences Karen Kashmanian Oates. Faber studies human dynamics and organizational change. Using the capabilities of the new Analytics Lab, he's interested in how framing insights gained from big data can motivate process improvements, particularly within healthcare settings. "How you present the data and how you tell the story has a huge impact," he says. "Once you gain insights from big data sets, you need to know how to make them persuasive and motivational. Brenton Faber, co-founder of the We're grateful to Dimensional Insight for helping WPI establish a new Analytics Lab lab where we can develop and test theories that can have a signiƂ- at WPI. cant impact on systems and industries critical to our society, such as healthcare." Working in the lab, students and researchers across disciplines will analyze large data sets using The Diver Solution, Dimensional Insight's business intelligence software. "By housing the lab in the humanities department, we hope to address the human dynamics issues, the narrative, and not just the technical issues," says Faber, who directs the lab. Faber learned the importance of using the right language to frame data-driven initiatives while he was director of analytics and new project development at Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Potsdam, N.Y. He found that if he wanted to persuade staff to act, he needed to use the terms they were accustomed to thinking in. "While a lot of the language used at the hospital was quantitative—blood pressure, pulse rates, and so on—the staff didn't have a vocabulary for talking quantitatively about hospital operations," he recalls. "Quantifying everyday things like infection rate and the readmissions rate seemed to motivate the staff to work toward process improvement." Faber hopes the Analytics Lab will ultimately be a nexus for undergraduate projects, graduate research, and corporate-sponsored research. As a step in that direction, the lab is working on a large-scale analysis of data related to medical visits by patients with congestive heart failure. They hope to learn the impact of preventative care on outcomes, explore which treatments seem to work best, and to even quantify how much money those measures can save. "Ideally," says Faber, "we hope to to eventually be able to cross-link disease, utilization, and Ƃnance data to get a more detailed description of medical practice." Winter 2013 69

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