Data+ is a full-time ten-week summer research experience for undergraduates and master’s students interested in exploring new data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary challenges. It is suitable for students at all levels and from all majors.
Students join small teams (a maximum of three undergraduates and one master’s student) and work alongside other teams in a communal environment. They learn how to marshal, analyze and visualize data, while gaining broad exposure to the field of data science.
Data+ is offered through the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke and is part of the Bass Connections Information, Society & Culture theme.
Timing
Data+ runs from late May through late July each year. The application deadline is in February.
Compensation
Participants receive a $5,000 stipend for their work on their Data+ team. Students are expected to work 40 hours per week on their project and are not allowed to take classes at the same time.
Climate+
Within Data+, students can apply to the Climate+ program, which aims to advance interdisciplinary understanding of climate change’s causes and societal impacts and to identify sustainable solutions.
Explore Projects for Summer 2022
- AdoptADrain: Working With Citizen Science Data to Understand Plastic Pollution Within Stormwater
- AI-Powered Transcription of Historical Manuscripts
- Analyzing the Gap in Cancer Control Equity in China
- A City and Its River: Contaminant Risk in Durham*
- Data+Fest: Building a Dashboard and Educational Resources for DataFest
- Data Science for Community Safety in Durham
- Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism
- Exploring Novel Machine Learning Techniques for Brain Computer Interface (BCI) Applications
- Farm to Fork (Year 2)
- Finding Medieval Irish People Using Drones: The HELM Project
- Gamifying Risk Identification for Alcohol Use Behaviors*
- Improving Infection Detection Efficiency With Wearables*
- Investigating Wetland Carbon Emissions in the Southeast U.S. Under Climate Change†
- Learning to Communicate
- Mapping the Trajectories of Duke Doctoral Students
- Melting Ice, Shifting Krill
- Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County*
- Modeling Microbial Growth to Understand Pathogenesis and Biological Resilience
- Pilot Earthquake Early Warning in Kathmandu*
- Plus Programs Data Exploration
- Policy Surveillance of UHC Financing in Developing Countries*
- Predictable Control of Spatial Patterns Formed by Bacterial Consortia
- River Ice Timing and Duration in a Warming Climate: Field Camera Image Classification†
- Small Town Policing Accountability
- Tracking Climate Change Causes and Impacts With Satellites and AI*,†
- Understanding the Course of Disease via Registration on Electronic Health Records Data
- Understanding Electric Consumption Profiles With an Emphasis on Data Privacy†
- Visualizing Durham Public School Communities*
*Related to a 2022-2023 Bass Connections project.
†Climate+ project
Tackle Exciting Data Challenges
"Participating in Data+ definitely changed my perception of data science research. It was more interdisciplinary than I expected, and the opportunity to work with experts across different fields, such as Medicine, Civil Engineering and Statistics, was a defining aspect of my Data+ experience."
–Serge Assaad '18 (Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Develop Career-Oriented Skills
"When applying for jobs after graduation, I got the majority of my interviews from people who wanted to hear more about my Data+ project. I got my first job out of college from a connection I made through Data+ and got a promotion ... because I learned at Data+ what most people don’t learn until a few years into their career."
–Lindsay Hirschhorn '17 (Mechanical Engineering)
Browse Past Projects
- Agile Waveform Design
- American Predatory Lending
- Constructing Utopias in Restoration London
- Creating Artificial Worlds for Energy Access
- CovIdentify
- Data Visualization for Family Health
- Dashboard for Public Investments
- Detecting and Matching Similar Networks
- Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism
- From Farm to Fork
- The Impact of Virtualized Museum Collections
- Mapping the Trajectories of Duke Doctoral Students
- Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County
- Modeling Microbial Growth and Resilience
- NLP in the Investment Office
- Pivers Island Coastal Observatory
- Predicting Baseball Athletic Performance
- Racial Disparities in the Child Welfare System
- Rainforest XPRIZE
- Rubenstein Library Card Catalog
- Understanding Voting Patterns and Interactions with Gerrymandering
- Visualizing Durham Public School Communities
- Web Attack Features
- ABOUT-US: A BOundary Update Tool for Utility Services
- AI in the Investment Office
- American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis
- Applying Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) to Security Threat Hunting with Duke’s ITSO
- Computational Approaches to the History of Cartography
- Computational Tools to Improve Healthy and Pleasurable Eating in Young Children
- Data Science for Retention of College Women in Tech
- Deep Learning for Rare Energy Infrastructures in Satellite Imagery
- Disease Emergence and Richness in Primates
- Finding Space Junk with the World’s Biggest Telescopes
- For Love of Greed: Tracing the Early History of Consumer Culture
- Forecasting Campus Energy Usage for Improved Energy Management
- Human Activity Recognition using Physiological Data from Wearables
- Linking Urban Land Use to Aquatic Metabolism Regimes
- Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County
- Network Visualization of Foot Traffic Patterns
- Neural Network-based Self-adjusting Computational Processors
- On Being a Blue Devil: The Changing Profile of the Duke Student Body
- Piloting an Environmental Public Health Tracking Tool for North Carolina
- Predicting Baseball Players’ Athletic Performance Utilizing Baseline Assessments of Vision
- Predicting Blindness in Duke’s Glaucoma Patient Population
- Predictive Churn Models for Duke Season Ticket Holders and Annual Donors
- Predictive Modeling of Mechanical Failures at Sea
- Protecting American Investors? Financial Advice from before the New Deal to the Birth of the Internet
- Race and Housing in Durham over the Course of the 20th Century
- Taking Electrification on the Road: Exploring the Impact of the Electric Farm Equipment Roadshow
- Latinxs and the Right
- When Black Stories Go Global: Analyzing the Translation of African-American Literature and Film
- American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis
- Basketball Analytics Pipeline: From Raw Video to Dynamic Visualization
- Big Data for Reproductive Health
- Breaking the Bundle: Analyzing Duke’s Journal Subscriptions
- Data-driven Approaches to Illuminate the Responses of Lakes to Multiple Stressors
- Detecting and Predicting Impacts of Saltwater Intrusion on Coastal Ecosystems
- Duke Building Energy Use Report
- Durham Evictions
- Getting Granular on Social Determinants of Health
- Human Rights in the Postwar World
- Identifying Extreme Events in Wholesale Energy Markets
- Investigating Oil and Gas Production in the United Kingdom
- Invisible Adaptations: From Hamlet to the Avengers
- Network Visualization of IoT Devices
- Neuroscience in the Courtroom
- On the Shelf: Exploring Oil and Gas Production in the Gulf of Mexico
- Optimizing Risk Assessment for Duke University Student Athlete Injury Prevention
- Recidivism in the Durham County Jail
- Remembering the Middle Passage
- Security Threat Intelligence Analytics
- Smart Meters and Real-time Electricity Consumption Monitoring Algorithms to Reduce Electricity Theft in Developing Countries
- Speech Emotion Analysis
- StreamPulse: From Streaming Data to Streaming Insights
- Urodynamic Data and Machine Learning
- U.S. Ambivalence about Making Profits
- Visualizing the Nation’s Water Quality Data
- A Wider Lens on Energy: Adapting Deep Learning Techniques to Inform Energy Access Decisions
- Maximizing Data Communication for Faster Energy Access
- Data and the Global Corporate Bond Market
- Construction Machinery and the Business Cycle
- Co-Curricular Technology Pathways E-advisor
- Duke Wireless Data
- Data-driven Improvement of Datacenter Performance
- Smartphones and the Sixth Vital Sign
- Data and Technology for Fact-Checking
- Gerrymandering and the Extent of Democracy in America
- Energy Infrastructure Map of the World
- Social Determinants of Health
- Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake
- Improving the Machine Learning Pipeline at Duke
- Rare Metabolic Diseases
- Complex Decisions, Real Numbers: Medical Decision-Making
- Women's Spaces
- Visualizing the Lives of Orphaned and Separated Children
- How Do We Build and Grow a PTA?
- Pirating Texts
- Big Data for Reproductive Health
- Deep Learning for Single Cell Analysis
- Poverty in Writing & Images
- Analytical Exploration for Duke Development
- Mental Health Interventions by the Durham Police (Year 2)
- Data Viz for Long-term Ecological Research and Curricula
- Nutrition Dependent Growth in the Laboratory Rat
- Visualizing Suffering: Tracking Photojournalism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis
- Quantifying Phenotypic Evolution during Tumor Growth
- Mental Health Interventions by Durham Police
- Visualizing Real Time Data from Mobile Health Technologies
- Alumni Gifts and Data Analysis
- Electricity Access in Developing Countries from Aerial Imagery
- Building a Duke SLED (Duke Surgery Longitudinal Educational Database)
- Ghost Bikes
- Open Data for Tobacco Retailer Mapping
- Quantified Feminism and the Bechdel Test
- Classification of Vascular Anomalies using Continuous Doppler Ultrasound and Machine Learning
- Comparing the Exploration of Academic Majors at Duke
- Smart-phone-assisted digital rejuvenation of medieval paintings
- MyHealthTeams Data Exploration and Visualization
- Understanding Duke Research Based on Large-Scale Faculty Publication Records
- Online Financial Behavior and the Internet of Things
- Marriage and Statistics through Space and Time
- Validating a Topic Model that Predicts Pancreatic Cancer from Latent Structures in the Electronic Medical Record
- Open-source Spatial Visualization for Public Health Intelligence
- Quantifying Rare Diseases in Duke Health System
- Controlled Substance Monitoring Visualization
- Mapping the Ocean Floor
- Analytics for Faculty Success
- Durham Neighborhoods
- Transgender Discrimination Survey
- Data-driven Parking
- Smoking and Activity Space
- Eye Movements and Food Choice
- EMR and Clinical Trials
- Fruit Fly Morphogenesis
- Black Queen Hypothesis
- Data-driven Development
- Learning to Search More Deeply
- NC Budget Data and Policy
- Election Polling
- Smart(er) Routing at Theme Parks
- Predicting Pancreatic Cancer
- Diagnosing Diabetes and Predicting Complications
- LungMAP
- Health Networks and Disparities
- National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color
- Drugs and Gluttony
- Team Science
- Night Vision
- RTI-Duke Data+ Practicum
- Energy Resource Assessment
- Geometry and Topology for Data
- Gerrymandering
- Solar Power Estimation
- Prolific Pigs? Mating Reproductive Capacity with Market Price in Early Twentieth Century Pig Breeding
- Workforce Incentives
- What makes a good reservoir?
- Geometry of Weather
- Interactive environmental data applications
- Shape-based Distances Between Bones
- Constructing Challenges from Duke MOOC data
- microRNA Host Response to Infection
- Food Choices and Behavioral Economics
- Risky Decision-Making
- Quantifying the Science-Humanities Gap