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BIG DATA ALLOWS BETTER RESPONSES, SOONER
‘When you look at data,
you can see longer-term
trends and follow what
people are thinking and
respond to that in real
time in terms of offering
new services and new
products.’
34 ARIZONA ALUMNI MAGAZINE
hat individualized approach is at the heart of Just as Amazon boasts of having a 360-degree
TRam’s Smart Campus work, which Baldasare view of the customer — being able to predict what
hopes may eventually be incorporated into the an individual will buy before they do it — so too
predictive work the UA is already doing. can other organizations leverage data to predict
Ram says generalized solutions are no longer and respond to the evolving needs of those they
enough — in any industry. serve, Ram says.
“We don’t live in a static world. Our
“We live in an era where you shouldn’t be
generalizing about groups of people,” Ram says. preferences change, our behavior changes, what
“You should be personalizing solutions at the we do changes, our whole life changes,” Ram
individual level.” says. “When you look at data, you can see longer-
That thinking underlies many of Ram’s term trends and follow what people are thinking
projects, ranging from her health care research to and respond to that in real time in terms of
identify high-cost hospital patients at the point of offering new services and new products. And
admission to her Smart Cities work in Fortaleza, you can do interventions and see immediate
Brazil, which aims to tackle public transportation reactions to these interventions and say, ‘This
challenges. These and other research projects was a good way to do it; this was not.’ So you’re
take on societal challenges to produce solutions able to make decisions in a lot shorter time —
with policy and social implications by harnessing better decisions — and then you can measure
the power of big data, large-scale network whether your decisions are working or not.”
analysis and machine learning techniques. In the case of freshman retention,
Coming up with targeted solutions is possible intervention needs to come early to be most
today more than ever before, thanks to what Ram effective, whether it is an email from an adviser
refers to as the “datafication phenomenon” — our or perhaps an invitation from the adviser for the
ability to measure and quantify things that we student to participate in a time management
couldn’t in the past, from students’ interactions seminar or some other activity that could boost
on campus to the number of steps it takes to walk social interaction.
to work in the morning. Those data are generated “We think by doing these interventions by the
continuously from many different sources, often 12th week, which is when students make up their
with a precise time and location associated with mind, you’re sort of doing what Amazon does
them. — delivering items you didn’t order but will be
“My philosophy in doing prediction modeling ordering in the future,” Ram says.
is to combine signals from many different
sources to understand the problem,” Ram says.
“We now live in a sensing environment. We
live in an environment where everything is
connected, so our whole world is even more
than an ‘internet of things’ — it is an internet of
people, data and things. It’s all three connected to
each other, and it’s all about understanding those
connections. This is where network science and
machine learning interact and allow us to make
better predictions.”