Our Industry Partnerships
WPI’s Executive Advisory Board prioritizes industry partnerships with exceptional corporations, both regionally and internationally. They and our other top executives are imperative to helping drive the success of our program and to meeting the needs of corporate America, particularly in conjunction with our sponsored GQPs, which give students the opportunity to work on real-world problems for the businesses with whom they collaborate, such as IBM, EnerNoc, and IOMICS.
Benefits of a Sponsored GQP
A team of 3-4 Data Science graduate students works under the terms of a mutually beneficial agreement between the corporate sponsor and WPI. The sponsor specifies a challenging business problem and provides data for the students to analyze. Students are expert in a variety of skills and professional experience and each team is adept in statistics, data cleaning, data modeling and visualization, computer programming, and with using industry-standard analytical software tools.. Students also receive instruction in teamwork, project management and communication skills. The Graduate Qualifying Projects contribute to cutting-edge data science STEM programs through innovative project-based education that bridges the gap between educational training and industry.
For sponsors:
- Bring together faculty and aspiring data scientists to tackle the sponsor’s problem with new ideas and vision
- Access to a well-trained and much sought-after talent pool with students interested in the field of big data and data science
- Gain exclusive access to new techniques and technologies
- Possibly create new intellectual property and value for their corporation
For students:
- Form meaningful experiences as students apply their data science knowledge in a team-based setting with real-world data analytics problems
- Share field knowledge regarding the terminology, challenges, and tool sets prevalent in the application domain particular to the sponsor
- Explore new techniques and technologies in data science and expand their resumes
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Engage in interdisciplinary team experiences, deepening their theoretical training via practical experiences
Samples of Recent Graduate Qualifying Projects and Their Sponsors
- “Aircraft Health Predictive Analytics,” sponsored by IBM
- “Scientific Data Cloud,” sponsored by Pfizer
- “Public School Website Design,” sponsored by MassINC
- “Clustering Time Series Data Based on a Given Distance Function,” sponsored by EnerNOC
- “University Lookup Via Textual Analytics”, sponsored by MathWorks
- “Anomaly Detection in Cybersecurity,” sponsored by Seceon
- “Bioassay Concept Mapping: Limitations of Current NLP Technologies,” sponsored by IOMICS
- “Data on Demand,” sponsored by GRC