 Hi, I'm Kate Young, and you're listening to This is Purdue, the official podcast for Purdue University. As a Purdue alum and Indiana native, I know firsthand about the family of students and professors who are in it together, persistently pursuing and relentlessly rethinking. Who are the next game changers, difference makers, ceiling breakers, innovators? Who are these Boilermakers? Join me as we feature students, faculty and alumni taking small steps toward their giant leaps and inspiring others to do the same. There's a lot of evidence that students really excel when they're living and learning in community. I guess historically, if you really look back in the tradition of it, it's an apprenticeship type model. It's a learning by doing type of model. I think they learn as much from each other as they learn from me. And I think they became very invested in each other's success. The data science is very popular now, but it's not necessarily easy, right? I mean, you know, we really provide a substantive program for the students, but it's challenging. And I think the students really rose to that challenge and supported each other as we provided some pretty real world kind of experiences for them, you know, some unique kind of experiences other students didn't have access to. 20 billion devices, that's right, 20 billion are now connected to the Internet. By 2030, that number will reach one trillion. For all of the Purdue University fans out there, which I hope is, well, everyone listening to this podcast, it probably won't shock you that the University is at the forefront of researching and analyzing data coming from all of these devices. Cell phones, laptops, iPads, Apple Watches, Fitbits, the list goes on. Jay Ackridge, Purdue Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Diversity, explains. It's very clear that as we look to the future, the role of data has radically changed, which means we need to be thinking about what it means for the education our students receive. As we think about our university's focus on the persistent pursuit of innovation, there's really just no better example than what's going on in the data mind. This very unique learning environment where students from across our campus come together to solve real-world problems that are brought to them by external partners, industry, government, and not-for-profits, we couldn't be prouder of the work that's happening in the data mind and the future for where we can take that idea long-term. Since I started hosting this podcast at Purdue, I can't count how many times I've been asked, have you heard about the data mind? Or been told, oh, you have to do a story on the data mind. Then there's everything I've heard about the director of the data mind, Mark Daniel Ward. Have you talked to Mark yet? You're just going to love him. And things like, you have to talk to Mark. He's the professor every parent wants their child to have in college. Needless to say, I was intrigued. When I first thought about data, my mind went to statistics and math. But it's so much more than that. The study of data affects people in every sector you can think of. Data science solutions are applied to everything from preventative maintenance and manufacturing to food science initiatives that address food insecurity. As Jay just touched on, the data mind is a group of Purdue's very own students analyzing data and finding meaning in it. These data scientists are the critical link that transform data into information that can be applied to solve real world problems. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mark. As I mentioned, Mark is the director of the data mind and he's also a professor of statistics at Purdue University. Let's start at the beginning and hear Mark explain what data science is. So at least the way we interpret data science is it's using data to make insights. Could be research insights, could be business insights. You know, anytime that folks are using data to basically perform their studies or to do something they couldn't do if they didn't have those tools, I'd characterize that as data science. How has this exploded with all of the numbers of laptops and phones and iPads and, you know, even the past five, ten years? Right. I mean, people's cell phones are more powerful than the computers we used to have, right? I mean, it's truly remarkable. So it does seem to me that because devices are just so prevalent, so affordable to purchase now and deployed everywhere that the availability of data from streaming sensors, audio, video, every kind of data source you can imagine. It's sort of being harnessed now, right? I mean, people are using it to perform studies and get insights about things we never would have thought imaginable before. It's a pretty exciting time. The first flyer advertising the data mind was posted in 2013. Mark explains how this initiative was created and the importance of it being an immersive living learning community environment. In 2013, we started a grant from the National Science Foundation for the statistics living learning community. That was such a pleasure. One of my favorite things I've done in my career because we had 20 sophomore undergraduates supported on that grant every year for the course of five years, a hundred students all together. Those students came from every walk of life at Purdue. You know, they had all kinds of different professional aspirations and backgrounds and skills and passions they brought to the table. And it was almost like just having our little family, you know, I mean just having that group of people where you got to know them so well and in their early part of their career, you got very invested in each other. As an example, all of those students live together. They all were working with a faculty member over the course of nine months. They were working in a modality where it was active learning, project oriented learning. I think their learning was much deeper as a result. The last year of that grant, we thought, well, the grant's going to wind down this year. Why don't we spin up something beyond just the statistics living learning community? And we started something called the data mine. We had a hundred students. I think it went well. It was largely the same kind of model. It was a little more geared toward that broad student training. As a result, when the statistics living learning community grant was completely finished, we said, well, let's see which departments are on campus. We'd like to have learning communities of their own. We started 20 new learning communities and one corporate partnership the next year. Many of those learning communities kind of flourished and took on a life of their own. Some of them are integrated into the life of departments and colleges around campus now and our corporate partners program just just took off. I think we had 11 companies the second year. This is our third year and we have 26 corporate partners we're working with. I'm going to guess we'll have more than 40 companies we work with next year. Those corporate partners Mark is referring to the data mine works with companies like Cummins, Bex, Hybrids, Ford Motor Company, Alenko, Rolls-Royce and John Deere just to name a few students in the data mine work on real projects sponsored by these companies and they meet weekly with mentors from the company to tackle questions and problems the partner may be facing as faculty. I can be a little self-critical and say you know in graduate school we don't learn how to do some of these external facing experiences for students and experiential learning is becoming so popular so worthwhile. I feel like the time was just ripe for an initiative like the data mine. Students can put their data science skills to use and really see the benefit right off the bat in their career. Let's dig deeper into that living and learning community. So I know you went to Purdue. I went to Purdue. It's a really big school. It's it's huge. It can be really intimidating, especially if you come from a small community, maybe a really small high school. So why was it so important to you to have that one-on-one professor interaction with the students? There's a lot of evidence that students really excel when they're living and learning in community. It's I guess historically if you really look back in the tradition of it, it's an apprenticeship type model. It's a learning by doing type of model. I think they learn as much from each other as they learned from me and full disclosure. But I also have my office in the residence hall where the students live. The students all lived on one floor of one part of the Hill & Brand residence hall and just as I alluded to earlier, I think they became very invested in each other's success. The data science is very popular now, but it's not necessarily easy, right? I mean, you know, we really provide a substantive program for the students, but it's challenging. And I think the students really rose to that challenge and supported each other as we provided some pretty real world kind of experiences for them, you know, some unique kind of experiences other students didn't have access to. And I saw a photo of you eating dinner with them. That's incredible. I mean, I went to professors office hours, but I never have shared a meal with them. My family and I've always had dinner for my students in our home. And as we had a learning community, I just thought it's so natural if we meet them on their own turf in their own space. We would actually have floor dinner as a common traditional learning communities with the students once a week. But then actually as we spun up data mine, we had our seminars before COVID in the dining court. We have a big projector screen in there and there's no lecture. You know, it's all project oriented work. So just to be present with the students in their own home where they live in a very comfortable space where they feel like they belong. It seemed very natural to me to try. I hope after the COVID pandemic winds down that we can get back to some of those routes of our program. You are probably assuming that the students in the data mine are all STEM majors, but anyone from any major is able to join and there's no computer science background required. Liberal arts, business and agriculture students are all part of the data mine. It's a way for students to learn about the data sciences while they're learning about their own disciplines. I'm fortunate to be surrounded by just so many supportive colleagues and students who are willing to pilot new initiatives and they just they put up with Dr. Ward somehow. I'm really fortunate in that regard, but you know you alluded to having gone to Purdue. You know how it is we're fortunate to have a university where people collaborate across disciplines and this kind of interdisciplinary work. I think it resonates a lot here. One neat thing about the data sciences is I'm learning all the time. You know, I have my niche. I have the skills I learned in my own training, but most of the work I do is in domains far beyond my own area of expertise. I have to rely on people who have domain expertise and they know about the data and they know about the application and the whole culture of the research projects we work in. It's just naturally team oriented. It just makes sense to collaborate very, very closely on an effort like this. I learned from the students themselves. I mean, they bring this rich set of interest to the data mine. They've got their backgrounds and their major and their literature and their subject matter expertise and then their whole career ahead of them that they're so excited about. Those are things I can't replicate. I don't bring those things to the table. Everybody's got data now. We kind of alluded to that earlier, but each discipline integrates the data analysis in its own way, right? So I really rely on the students and the faculty who have that domain expertise. And I feel like you can't separate the analysis and the domain of data science from the domain where the analysis is applied and used. I don't think I'm the only faculty member who likes to collaborate beyond one's department and one's college. You know, some of the most exciting science we do at Purdue, some of the neatest initiatives in engineering and in agriculture and the health sciences and technology and so on. These kind of things don't happen in isolation. They happen when lots of faculty and students and research scientists and such get together in large teams to accomplish problems that one person's not going to be able to tackle on their own, right? I mean, we don't have the domain knowledge on our own individually. We don't have the computing resources. Some of the largest problems our society faces are just naturally very interdisciplinary and that kind of resonates with tackling the data sciences this way. The data line is structured into 20 learning communities of around 25 or 50 students each. The students participate in courses, seminars, research and professional development experiences, which are offered by departments, research centers and colleges throughout the university. During the 2018-2019 school year, the data mine was introduced to around 100 students on campus. In 2019 through 2020, the team scaled it up again to more than 600 students. And by next year, Mark estimates they'll be able to include more than 1000 students in the data mine. He discusses the incredible growth of this initiative throughout the years. Just thinking self-critically about what we do as faculty, you know, frequently we do share the things we know best in our domain. Takes a little bit of vulnerability and willingness to just collaborate way more than one normally would. I think to build a program like this sort of takes a large team and a lot of trust and a lot of working together. And I, I just love work like that. You know, that's something that really appeals to me. And again, it feels kind of timely. The students vote with their feet. You know, they're going to take the kinds of courses that they sense are useful for them. And honestly, I think we're going to have more than 1000 students next year and we've done hardly any recruiting at all. It's almost all by word of mouth now, which is kind of flattering considering the courses the students take don't necessarily contribute to their major or minor program of study at all. They're just general education credits that any student can use toward their 120 some credits that they need, but they find that these are valuable enough that they keep coming back here after year. I remember being in college here at Purdue and attempting to build up my resume with zero professional work experience yet. What could I add to my resume that would be valuable to future employers? What types of stories and examples from my time at Purdue could I tell in an interview? It's something most college students are a bit worried about before graduating. Well, on top of having the unique opportunity to learn in this immersive environment, the data mine students are learning some of the skills most sought after by companies and graduate programs. It's just another massive perk that comes with being involved in the data mine. I think that's one thing that's really useful for the students that they can take internships or work in the data mine and learn a certain set of skills. Really go apply them anywhere. It's it's kind of a buyer's market for the students right now. You know, these students can get hired almost anywhere they want to go after they're finished at Purdue. Students in the data mine are not only learning technical and scientific tactics. They're learning real world skills and growing, preparing themselves for their future careers. These skills really resonate with employers, but even beyond the skills that they learn themselves, I mean, knowing Python and our sequel databases, working on a Unix cluster, you know, there's all of the hard scientific skills that they learn, but just their ability to communicate, work in a team, tackle a real world problem over and over again. If you talk to alums or you talk to folks that work in industry, these are the soft skills that are just instrumental for students and getting hired. There's many opportunities at Purdue to learn these skills, but they're absolutely fundamental to what we do in the data mine, especially in our corporate partners program. And along with that to just speaking very generally here, there is some sense that because these students are so marketable, they can go somewhere and work for a couple of years. And if they want to get a big promotion and move to another company, they can do so and become a team leader and then move on to another company and kind of work their way around the industry. They can be very mobile, but I'm just going to put forward that I love it when a student gets hired at their dream job and you can see that they're going to stay there for 20 years and really make their mark and get to know the people so deeply within their company because that's priceless. As part of our work in data mine, I think they get to find out what's that culture in the company where they're taking their first job and maybe have a better chance of doing that their their first time out of college or grad school. You know, really getting the job that they wouldn't have been able to get and falling in love with it so deeply that they do stay there for the long term. If you can't tell already, Mark has a real love for Purdue University and especially for his students. He discusses Purdue's support in the data science initiative. And you'll want to hear his hope for a certain invitation in the near future. In the last several years, the data sciences have been embedded in all of the colleges. I can go to talk with my colleagues in College of Agricultural and Biological Engineering where I have a courtesy appointment or folks in agronomy or my colleagues at Animal Sciences. Everybody sort of gets it that the data sciences are instrumental in their field. It's not like we have it all figured out. Again, it's not like the curricula has settled. It's such a time of active development. It just gives us a whole new way to collaborate across departments and colleges. So Purdue seems to have really embraced that. The departments and the colleges and Discovery Park, the Provost's Office and the EVPRP's Office have just been uniformly supportive of the integrative data science initiative. And what about that community of students that you touched on earlier and that family feeling? Tell us a little bit more about that. I mean, nothing happens without the students. I have a feeling the friendships and partnerships and teams that they participate in while they're in college. For many of them are going to last their whole life. I was joking with one student about his friend and his friend's girlfriend. I said, well, you know, they met in the datamine. I said, I'm going to get a wedding invitation from these guys sometime. But even beyond that, someone said when things really take off or when these thousand students all get hired into industry and then they get a couple of years into their career and come back and want projects of their own. Well, I'm so excited about that. I'm already seeing that with that original group of students with that statistics living learning community that they've gone to grad school. They've gotten their graduate degrees. They're already team leaders out in industry. I just wrote a paper with nine of them kind of just retrospective of the first five years of their career. And wow, I've rarely enjoyed writing a paper so much. I mean, it's neat to see these students flourish after they leave Purdue. So sure. Well, one, we need to do another podcast episode on the datamine wedding. That is an episode that I want to tell that story. Right. I didn't name names here. Yeah, have them get in touch with me. I am serious about that wedding podcast episode, by the way. In April, it was announced that Purdue will be launching the Indiana Digital Crossroads Initiative with a $10 million grant from Lily Endowment, Inc. The goal of Indiana Digital Crossroads is to create regional data science hubs and begin geographically based programs designed to engage businesses and undergraduate students. This initiative will take the datamine concept beyond the Purdue West Lafayette Campus to two regional hubs, Purdue University Fort Wayne and Purdue Polytechnic Institute in Anderson. This allows Purdue to share the success of its datamine and integrative data science initiative more broadly. I feel so fortunate that the Lily Endowment has trusted us to do some of this statewide development in the data science. I think a big concern in Indiana is economic development. Just as the data sciences takes hold, industry has to continue to change, right? The way in which we manufacture things and in which we deliver health care and have supply chain and produce all of the crops around the state. All of these industries are continuing to be affected by the impact of data science. And so we've got to work with our colleagues throughout the state, but both in academia and in industry to continue to develop partnerships. I was talking to my colleagues in Purdue, Fort Wayne and emailing with my colleagues at the PPI in Anderson and just feeling so, so thankful for all of their partnerships as we're spinning up this Indiana Digital Crossroads. We also feel fortunate that as that program evolves, we have a partnership with the Indiana School for the Deaf. I'm kind of becoming more and more aware as we work in the data sciences just how pervasive the impact of the data sciences can be on people's career at all levels and again, across all industries. It's a pretty neat opportunity the Lilly Endowment has given us. So I'm looking forward to it and we're just at the beginning here, right? I mean, the award was just made in the last couple weeks, right? So it's an exciting time. Mark shares the continued growth he hopes to see with the data mine, especially in Indiana. Well, we could come back to the fact that, you know, all of these hundreds and hundreds of students are going to get real jobs very soon and then hopefully stay in touch with us, build out partnerships all over the country, right? And especially here in Indiana. I'm assuming that the data sciences are just going to become more and more integrated into our classes into the way that we think the way that we build computing systems and even the way that we conduct our science. I hope Purdue remains one of those institutions where the data sciences is really embedded in everything we do across the colleges and I have every reason to believe that it will. Why do you think that Purdue is so uniquely positioned to own this specific initiative? Well, I mean, not only are we the land grant, I feel that we've been mindful, especially in recent years of partnerships, not just with industry, but with commerce, government partnerships, military partnerships, all of the agriculture partnerships that I mentioned earlier. It's the kind of place where we like to really translate science and engineering and agriculture into actual developments, right into patents and into impact out in industry. And then again, you come back to the people who are at the heart of it, right? So many people we interact with, as you said, they're either alums or they have some affiliation, some love for Purdue. You know, they, they glee black and gold, right? You know, so yeah, it's a very special place we work at, isn't it? It sure is. If anyone bleeds black and gold, it is certainly Mark. As I mentioned before, you're a Purdue alum. Did you ever imagine, you know, being where you are today as a professor and now the director of the data mine? Tell us how you feel about all of that. Well, my PhDs in mathematics and of course, data science is impacting the math sciences as well. It's going to sound crazy, but I just, I love that I got hired back at Purdue at the same place. I did my PhD. My wife and I spent three years in Philadelphia at University of Pennsylvania and will always hold pen deer in our hearts. But I gave up my third year as a postdoc to come back here to Purdue to start my tenure track and I just feel thankful every single day that I'm getting to have this. I don't even call it a job right. How can it be a job when when you love what you do so much? I get this opportunity to work with all of these students and colleagues. And as far as all of the work in the data sciences, I just again, I feel very thankful for the National Science Foundation for getting me started down this road to some of my colleagues at UC Berkeley who I took some really early training from in the data sciences. It's it's neat to see how this space continues to evolve and change across many disciplines in our university. I guess it's come across as we've been talking how thankful I feel that we've got such a broad team from the students all the way through the research scientists and faculty and administration and then all of our partners throughout all these different disciplines and sectors of industry. I I feel fortunate every day that the data sciences is making such a big impact but there's so many people working together to make that happen. Mark is passionate about making data research accessible to everyone. If you'd like to learn more about the Datamine at Purdue please visit datamine.purdue.edu You can also check out our episode show notes for more information. Thanks for listening to This is Purdue. For more information on this episode visit our website at purdue.edu slash podcast. There you can head over to your favorite podcast app to subscribe and leave us a review. And as always Boiler up.