Community Projects

The Data and Decision Sciences Lab is constantly working with local community partners on several data related projects that have a local and global impact.

Our team frequently works with other academic units, nonprofit organizations, businesses with open-data problems, and many agencies in the public sector. Many of our community projects use data and information that are publicly available. Topics of some of the community projects developed by our team include:

A bike sharing program is a system of automated stations scattered around a city. Customers can rent bicycles from these stations or kiosks and return them to any station in the network when they are through. In order to keep customer satisfaction high, the system must be re-balanced by moving bikes from stations that are fuller to the stations that are …

Many health insurance companies employ a staff of nurses who conduct in-home preventative exams and wellness …

With over 400 million players worldwide, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) continue to be a popular source of online recreation. MMOs frequently involve resource management and virtual economies. This project demonstrates the introduction of optimization strategies in the MMO game World of Warcraft. A simulated annealing algorithm …

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is defined by a collection of delivery vehicles (trucks) generally of the same capacity that operate from a single location (depot) and are charged with meeting the needs (demand) of the customers (nodes). The objective of the CVRP is to minimize the number of trucks and the combined total distance …

Libraries are essential to a healthy community. A public library’s primary focus is to provide services and information to meet the needs of individuals and groups. This project collaborated with the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to analyze the public library survey data collected annually by the …

This project developed a data visualization application designed to enable users of the CNS HIV Anti-Retroviral Therapy Effects Research the ability to graphically manipulate and explore clinical and experimental data collected and hosted therein. The project utilizes open-sourced statistical software, namely the Shiny package in R, to create …

Health insurance plays an important role in releasing people’s financial burden when they need health care. Even a small policy change in health insurance can have a big impact on everyone’s life. This project studied the status of health insurance in Nebraska, using the 2011-2015 American Community Survey (ACS) data collected from the …

How would the Latino population impact on the future regional and national elections in Nebraska and the United States? To answer this question, this project developed an interactive graphical tool to visually analyze various data sources from the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Nebraska database. The tool is built using R shiny package and works …

Data is a critical resource that can have a positive impact on the functioning of a democracy by improving policy making, innovation, and government efficiency. However, raw data, when captured and stored in data silos, simply is not valuable unless it has been analyzed, evaluated, and acted upon. Interactive data visualization is a key tool to analyze data …

With bike rentals in Omaha gaining popularity each year, it was important for the Heartland B-Cycle team to understand the patterns behind this growth. This project revealed some of these patterns and provided data to the team which aided them in planning for future demand of bike rentals. This project also found inefficiencies inside the current …

The use of voice recognition has increased substantially in everyday life. Many leading companies are using speech recognition technologies to develop personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. Speech recognition can also be used to extract valuable business information from calls to create a more personalized …

Maize tassels play a critical role to indicate the reproductive growth and health of the maize crop. Observation of maize tassels and plant growth is a tedious and challenging task which is mainly done by manual human efforts. In recent years, image-based approaches have received much attention in plant-related studies. The aim of this project was to detect …

The United States produces more corn than any other country in the world. The land used to plant corn is over nine million acres. The production of corn plays an indispensable role in the U.S. economy. Increasing corn production while reducing the amount of land used to grow corn have a positive effect on the U.S. economy. To achieve this goal, it is necessary …

Information extracted from multispectral imagery obtained from satellite or aerial devices has found applications in a wide range of areas including urban planning, crop and forest management, disaster relief, and climate modeling. At present, much of the extraction is still performed by human experts, making the process slow, costly, and error prone. The goal …

Libraries plays a crucial and integral role in providing educational and technological access for the public. People on the lower-income spectrum would typically be more reliant on public accesses to resources that are generally provided by libraries such as computers, books, internet, music, printers, study rooms, entertainment, etc. The limiting factor …

Corn is not only the food of humans and the feed of livestock, but it is also an important industrial raw material. It can be processed into more than 3,000 industrial products such as corn syrup, corn starch, etc. Corn is one of the essential foods in the world, with about one-third of the population using corn as their primary food. Among the global crop …

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 had an important economic and political influence on the United States. Several local governments such as Detroit, Michigan, Harrisburg, and Pennsylvania reported bankruptcy. Many local governments seek models and approaches to help them avoid or reduce the probability of municipal financial distress. This project …

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, approximately 74,000 children lived under poverty in the state of Nebraska in 2014. The same study suggests that almost 44,000 of these children came from a single parent family. These statistics make it clear enough to see that socio economic status plays an important role in the well-being of …

The application of statistical models has been used extensively to predict the outcomes of sporting competitions. However, for predicting point differential, the existence of a single model that is easily transferable across multiple sports is lacking. A primary reason exists because each sport can be defined by a unique set of characteristics. A characteristic …