Welcome to SURE 2024

SURE 2024

Department of Statistics & Data Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Introduction

Plan for today

• 9:15: Opening remarks + program overview

• 10:00: Meet the department staff (Jess/Chrissie/LeeAnn)

• 10:15: Meet the academic advisor (Glenn)

• 11:30 (ish): Lunch

Health (Posner 151)

• 11:30: Webinar

• 2:00: Lab

Sports (Posner 153)

• 12:30: Guest speaker

• 2:00: Lab

Who are we?

• Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University

• Lead instructor: Quang Nguyen (preferred form of address: Quang)

  • Office hours: 12:45-1:45pm Fridays

• Teaching assistants

  • Health: Akshay Prasadan (lead TA/project manager), Princess Allotey, Nick Kissel

  • Sports: Yuchen Chen, JungHo Lee, Daven Lagu

About SURE

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Explore cutting-edge statistics and data science methodology with applications in

• Heathcare: UnitedHealth Group Bridges to Healthcare Technology

• Sports: Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Camp (CMSACamp)

“The best thing about being a statistician…is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” — John W. Tukey

Goals

• Develop fundamentals research skills: data wrangling, visualization, modeling, communication

• Become familiar with R, tidyverse, Quarto (Markdown syntax), Git/GitHub

• Become familiar with cutting-edge statistical machine learning techniques

• Create a portfolio of projects and practice reproducible research

• Network with academic researchers and industry professionals

  • Help navigate your next steps—industry vs. graduate school

Resources

• Website

• Google Calendar

• Slack

• Email

Schedule (subject to change)

A typical day consists of 3 main events

• Lectures

• Presentations

• Labs

Lectures

Mon-Fri, 9:15-10:45am, Posner 151

• First ~2 weeks: EDA, basic data science tasks

• Next ~4 weeks: statistical modeling, machine learning

• After that: special topics, guest lectures

• 8th week: MN trip (Health), sport-specific activities, presentations on last day

Holidays: Juneteenth (Wed June 19) and Independence Day break (July 3-5)

Presentations

Around mid-day/lunchtime, Posner 151 (Health) or Posner 153 (Sports)

Note: dates/times may vary; check calendar

• Health: UHG webinar speakers

• Sports: project pitches, guest speakers

Labs

Mon-Fri, 2-3:30pm, Posner 151 (Health) or Posner 153 (Sports)

• Demo labs

• Project labs

  • will begin with a mini EDA project

  • then shift to focus on main project

EDA project

• Practice understanding the structure of a dataset and perform basic EDA and data visualization techniques in R, and using GitHub for collaboration

• Work in a group of 3

• Timeline

  • Release date: Thursday, June 6

  • 8-minute presentation on Tuesday, June 18 during lecture time

Main project

• Analyze a dataset in health or sports analytics to answer a research question that is important to people in your respective field

• Work in a group of 2-4

• Deliverables (more details will be provided later on)

  • Report
  • Poster
  • 8-min presentation

Miscellaneous

Reminders

• Fill out the survey forms (Communication and Data Science Background)

• Reset CMU wifi password (for non-CMU students)

Expectations

• In-person attendance

  • Be on time. PLEASE

• Participate and ask questions

• Work together. Help and support each other.

• Enjoy, learn and grow