Institutional innovation: maximizing student outreach through artificial intelligence (EducationDIVE: “One of the powerful things about AI … is that it allows schools to look at where students are at and what they need in a way more efficient and effective way than a staff member could and at scale”)
Welcome Analytics Staff Consortium!
The Analytics Staff Consortium (ASC) connects professional staff from across Harvard’s central administration and Schools who are analysts and whose work requires analytic expertise. The first year of the group was funded through a small grant from the Presidential Administrative Innovation Fund. Membership is voluntary and functions as a network designed to incubate and refine programmatic and other resources that support analysis at the university.
ASC’s charge is to:
- Improve the efficiency and quality of analysis through collaboration:
- Sharing expertise, information, and tools;
- Increasing dialogue across organizational boundaries and providing feedback and guidance to one another;
- Connecting colleagues with relevant people and groups on campus;
- Providing professional development opportunities; and
- Identifying expertise outside of Harvard in the form of print or digital materials or personnel.
- Address common analysis challenges and leverage collective expertise to inform and design solutions:
- Soliciting input about common interests, methodological questions and analysis challenges from the community; and
- Identifying priority cross-area projects and working on them collaboratively.
Welcome Digi*Pub!
DigiPub is the podcast of the Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative. Each episode explores the spectrum between content and its audiences and communities – everything from content to business to technology in the worlds of media and publishing. We start with a short interview with a guest, followed by some quick reactions from members of the Collaborative.
All HYPED Up: Boston Tableau User Group
Tableau made a big splash on Thursday with the announcement of Hyper, the next generation of data access for large and complex data sets. Hyper replaces Tableau Data Extract files as the default filetype for all Tableau extracts, and the promise of lightening fast data access was demonstrated using a complex geospatial example at the Hyperfest event hosted by AthenaHealth in Watertown.
This was a big announcement. Tableau even upgraded the hors d’ouvers for this event. A room full of Analytsts with curry chicken skewers is an attentive audience.
Tableau 10.5 is a big release. In addition to the new Hyper engine, highlights include the ability to embed visualizations directly in tooltips (when you rollover a data point, a nice mini-graph can appear in an informative bubble), and a connector to Box to name a few. Well…to name the few that have me most excited. We live on Box at work, and the inability to connect directly to our primary file store has been a sore point for a while.
I went back to the office to experience HYPER for myself by crunching several million rows of regional sales data with some modestly complex calculations built-in. Hyper did not disappoint. The resulting extract took seconds to produce…and now I can access it directly from Box.
My next question? Can Alteryx write to the Hyper format yet? And is there an Alteryx connector to Box?