Projects
The Social Media Macroscope
The Social Media Macroscope (socialmediamacroscope.org) is a project by University of Illinois Technology Services and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) with the goal of making social media data, analytics, and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students of all levels of expertise.
This web site is a resource for research, education and collaboration in the field of social media analytics. It hosts various resources which will help you learn about social media analytics. These resources come from contributors in our scientific community, and are used by visitors from all over the world.
Most importantly, https://socialmediamacroscope.org offers Analysis Tools which you can access from your web browser, so you can not only learn about but gather and perform analysis on social media yourself.
More information about this project can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6855269.v2.
New! The following use case studies demonstrate research conducted using the Social Media Macroscope:
Super Bowl Case Study
NBA Anthony Davis Case Study
Alexa-Illinois Pilot Program
The Alexa-Illinois Group is a project within the DTI Student lab designed to bring the usability and convenience of Amazon’s Alexa devices to students, faculty, and staff at the University of Illinois.
It began in the summer of 2018 as a collaboration between lab staff, undergraduate, and graduate students. Throughout the summer, the group built a dozen Alexa skills designed to improve the experience of students on campus. These skills included dining hall information, workstation availability, campus building information, and many others. To see videos demonstrating some of the skills visit the project page.
Fall 2018 will see an Alexa-Illinois pilot program launch in the University Residence Halls. The program will distribute 200 Echo Dots to residence hall students with the intent to collect usage data for future skill development.
Questions and comments can be directed to alexasupport@illinois.edu.
Community Innovation Project
The DTI Student Lab is working with the Urbana, Champaign and Savoy communities to help them analyze their maintenance request data and test new technologies for use in the community. For Champaign, this has included creating geo visualizations of the data as pictured above and starting work on correlating maintenance issues like flooding to weather data for the same timeframes. We’re also testing AI technologies like video recognition to streamline workflows. We’ve begun investigating areas of opportunity where we could partner with Urbana and Savoy as well.
Along with the cities the DTI Student Lab is also partnering with the Champaign Housing Authority to help them to collect and operationalize their data streams. This project includes data from local affordable housing complexes and will be used to help the Housing Authority provide better services to their residents.
Splunk for Data Analytics
The DTI Student Lab is working with Splunk, a leading data platform and analytics company, to pilot solutions for improving student success and build the backbone for a smart campus and smart city.
Current projects include: understanding how to analyze student success via disparate data sets, and looking to provide dashboards and visualizations to various campus technologies connected to the internet of things.