Research

Research Focus Areas

Faculty across disciplines work on shared research projects in data science areas as diverse as:

• Big data and high performance analytics
• Bioinformatics and genomic databases
• Business intelligence and predictive analytics
• Cryptography and cyber security
• Data mining and knowledge discovery
• Educational data mining
• Financial decision-making
• Healthcare data analytics

• Internet big data analytics
• Large-scale data management and infrastructures
• Numerical and statistical data analysis
• Optimization and prescriptive analytics
• Signal processing and information theory
• Social media analytics
• Statistical and machine learning
• Visual analytics of large data sets

Visualizing MBTA Data: An Interactive Exploration of Boston's Subway System

As part of Professor Matthew Ward's Data Visualization class, two of WPI’s brightest students, Mike Barry and Brian Card, worked on a fascinating interactive visualization project.

The exciting project, to analyze and display data released by Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) about its subway and real-time train location data was especially noteworthy after the winter of 2015! If you have ever ridden a subway train, anywhere in the world, you’ll love this project!

Their visual analytics tool helps people in Boston better understand transit and commute times in and out of the city.  The MBTA Visualization Project is a prime example of the power that Visual Data Analytics can offer in helping us make sense of and understand data. The MBTA Data Project is an especially exciting one as it allowed us to interactively explore public data; data that has a fundamental effect on the daily lives of Boston public transit commuters. 

Massachusetts Technology, Talent, and Economic Reporting System (MATTERS)

Nearly two dozen undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. students in WPI’s Data Science Program collaborated for 2 years, under the guidance of Professor Rundensteiner, to develop a novel data analytics system that could help shape economic policy in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Technology, Talent, and Economic Reporting System (MATTERS) is an online analytics dashboard empowered by a powerful dynamic data integration infrastructure. Extracting data sets across various public government data sites, the system allows users to quickly access, analyze and visualize a number of key factors impacting the economic competitiveness of US states.

This project is a collaboration between the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Under the supervision of Professor Elke Rundensteiner, students at WPI have worked with experts from high tech industry, research organizations, and higher education institutions developing this tool.