WPI Research is the research magazine of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It contains news and features about graduate research in the arts and sciences, business, and engineering, along with notes about new grants, books, and faculty achievements.
Issue link: http://wpiresearch.epubxp.com/i/90696
While the innovative techniques she and her students are developing can be applied in many fields, including business, scientific discovery, and security, Rundensteiner is currently focusing on solving problems in healthcare. For example, she has been working for several years with doctors at UMass Memorial Medical Center on a pilot project cen- tered on preventing infections within the hospital. The system targets healthcare workers and their hand- washing habits. Using Rundensteiner's techniques, com- puters process data relayed from sensors attached to soap dispensers, doors, and other locations within hospital rooms. If the instantaneous analysis reveals that workers have failed to wash their hands or to perform other critical infection- control procedure, they receive an immediate reminder to take the appropriate action to remediate the problem. More recently, Rundensteiner, in collaboration with colleagues at WPI and psychologists at UMass Memorial, has started work on a project that aims to deliver more cost- effective care to patients with addiction issues by tracking them between doctor visits through smartphones. The goal is to combine smartphone data with continuous measure- ments of stress levels, in real time, to identify situations that appear to put patients at risk of relapse, and to deliver appropriate interventions when they can be most effective. The system will transparently monitor how effective this assistive technology is in improving the patients' well-being. "This is a promising new use of real-time analytics," she says, "one that opens the door to other types of applications that can address a wide range of problems with important societal impact." Rundensteiner has received support from HP Labs' Innovation Research Program and the National Science Foundation in developing her data processing technology, which depends on a 20-computer cluster rapidly analyzing sequences of events. Along with gaining insights that can be acted on immediately, she analyzes the sequences to derive longer-range patterns. For example, in her work on infection control, she hopes to give doctors information they can use to improve processes at the hospital. Rundensteiner is also working with Mohamed Eltabakh, assistant professor of computer science, to extend the capa- bilities of Hadoop, a system for processing large, static data sets on computer clusters, so that it can also handle stream- ing sources, such as Twitter. Combining static and streaming data in the same system, she says, can result in richer insights in a range of disciplines, not achievable when working with archival data only. "To me, 'big data' doesn't mean just one type of data," she says. "It can include static data, and it can come from multiple dynamic sources. I want to develop new kinds of analytics that can pull together and learn from all types of knowledge." Telling the Story of Data Brenton Faber, professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of Humanities and Arts, also works with large, health-related data sets, but his goal is to use the data to inspire new ideas. Having long studied human dynamics and organizational change, he is interested in how framing insights gained from big data can motivate process improve- ments, 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 persua- sive and motivational." Faber is bringing this approach to data into the new Analytics Lab, which he co-founded with Andrew Trapp and Renata Konrad, assistant professors in WPI's School of Business. The lab received a start-up grant of funds, training, and software valued in excess of $350,000 from Dimen- sional Insight, a business intelligence firm in Burlington, Mass. Working in the lab, students and researchers across [24] Brenton Faber directs WPI's new Analytics Lab, which will bring together faculty members and students from many disciplines who want to draw on huge data sets to gain insights that can drive process improvement, particularly in healthcare.