2017 Annual Meeting

We were excited to host our annual meeting (August 28, 2017) at Teachers College, Columbia University in NY, NY.

This meeting included important opportunities to learn about what is happening in the North East Big Data in Education Community, including a talk by Dr. John Cherniavsky of the National Science Foundation. (Please view slides from this talk here.)

In the afternoon, participants attended either a workshop on this year's Big Data in Education Competition or tutorials on big data techniques.

Details about the workshop and tutorials, including recommended preparations are below:

Workshop, hosted by Dr. Neil Heffernan (WPI): Participants coming to the workshop on the Big Data in Education Competition were encouraged to bring a laptop and your favorite data mining tool(s)! Dr. Heffernan covered several aspects of the competition, answering questions about the data features that are already available, and other researchers were available to discuss previous research using these same data sets. Examples will be discussed using Weka (a tool to fit models) and Tensor Flow (Google's Deep Learning Tool). Participants were encouraged to access/explore these tools before the workshop, as well as to familiarize themselves with the information already available on the Big Data in Education Competition website.

Tutorial, hosted by Drs. Ryan Baker (UPenn) & Ivon Arroyo (WPI): This tutorial covered several educational data mining methods including prediction modeling, association rule mining, and Markov chains. Participants coming to the tutorials were encouraged to bring a laptop and to download Rapid Miner ahead of time. (You may want to apply for an Educational License, if applicable, which allows unlimited data rows as the default version of Rapid Miner only allows up to 10,000 rows).

If you would like to make sure that you are able to attend future meetings and researcher-training opportunities, please make sure to add your name through this link.