Blog

Two of our Data Science bootcamp students, Evan Lancaster and Mahesh Rao, and our Data Science instructor, Mary van Valkenburg, were invited to present at the inaugural Metro Data Day last Friday. Evan and Mahesh shared the insights they gained from their work with the Metro Nashville property violations data project. Read More

Learning from experts in the field and using real data allows our Data Science students to work through real-world situations and messy data. This month our students heard from local experts on graph database management, data visualization and storytelling, and machine learning. Read More

As a musician, Taylor Perkins knew his Data Science mid-course project had to involve music. Taylor wondered, “What makes a great song? What makes a popular song? Is there some secret formula that just draws in listeners?” He hypothesized that the energy and key of the song are important factors for a popular song and explored that in his project. Read More

Have you heard of the Bechdel Test? The test is a simple three point check that examines the gender imbalance in movies. Shruti Sharma decided to examine the Bechdel Test for her data science mid-course project. She explained, “I think it is an insightful way of looking at the issue of gender imbalance and how skewed its representation in pop culture is.” Read More

Have you thought about how changes in our climate might impact the spread of disease? With his background in biology and interest in global health and the climate, Sanjay Mishra wanted to know if the expanding geography of warmer seasons is allowing the vector population (mosquitoes, ticks, flies) to grow more rapidly, and thus increasing the rate of vector-borne diseases, such as West Nile Virus, Dengue, and Zika, or causing them to occur in new regions. Read More

Intrigued by Nashville’s significant economic growth in recent years and increased accessibility of data from the State of Tennessee, Paulo Martinez wanted to see if there was a correlation between the allocation of financial resources to school districts and educational outcomes, using ACT scores. Is the recent economic growth impacting the achievement gap in Tennessee? And is this increased revenue being distributed equally across school districts? Read More

Justin Rothbart has fond memories of his excited anticipation as the release date for a new video game approached. Video games allow him to connect to his youth, with some of his favorite games and series originating in the late 90’s. For his mid-course project in our data science bootcamp, he wanted to see if his view of video games from the late 90’s being the best matched the views of other video game fans. Read More

The Olympic Games bring excitement to world competition. Athletes from nations around the world gather together to celebrate achievement and to push the human body to do things never thought possible before. While the Olympic Games are so much more than medals, the medals can tell us a lot about the history of the Games. Inspired by the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea, Brandon Sanders created a Shiny app, Exploring Summer Olympic Data, 1896 - 2008, to navigate data collected for the last 112 years of Olympic events. Read More

When you think of NASA, you probably think of the space race, walking on the moon, or a potential mission to Mars. NASA is built on exploration and as a result of that, they have collected lots and lots of data. They currently have over 39,000 data sets! With all of this data and declining funding, NASA is turning to the community to find answers through Datanauts. Read More

This year Kaggle, a predictive modeling, analytics, and data sharing site, conducted its first ‘State of Data Science & Machine Learning’ survey, and received input from more than 16,000 respondents. We share a few of our highlights and how they relate to our Data Science Bootcamp. Read More