Data+

Kyle Bradbury on Improving Global Energy Access through Machine Learning and Collaboration

Sarah Dwyer
Kyle Bradbury and Bass Connections team members.
Kyle Bradbury (far left) and members of the 2018-19 Bass Connections project team Energy Data Analytics Lab: Energy Infrastructure Map of the World through Satellite Data (Photo: Energy Initiative)

Kyle Bradbury is managing director of the Energy Data Analytics Lab at the Duke University Energy Initiative. Recently, the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke (iiD) asked him to explain what he works on and how he involves students through the Data+ and Bass Connections programs. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Locating Energy Infrastructure Using Satellite Imagery

My research focuses on how we can make energy systems more affordable, accessible, reliable, and clean using machine learning and data analysis tools. The team that I work with, we’re working on questions around understanding where energy infrastructure is using satellite imagery. One of the challenges in this space is called geographic domain adaptation. If I have an algorithm that’s able to find solar panels in California and I train my algorithm there, how am I able to then use that to find solar panels in Africa, Asia, or Europe? Being able to transfer that can really increase the impact of the research that we’re doing, but it leads to a lot of challenging technical issues.

Energy Access

Another research area that I’ve been working on with other members of the team is looking at how we can use data to address some of the challenges in the energy access space. Right now there are close to a billion people around the world that don’t have access to electricity, but we don’t necessarily know which specific communities lack access, and we don’t always know where the grid infrastructure is that could potentially provide access to electricity.

Student Engagement

iiD has been a fantastic resource, especially with their program Data+. Data+ is a ten-week summer program for undergraduates to deeply engage in a data-focused research project. Over the last few years, we’ve engaged numerous undergraduates to help us with our research. They produced datasets and laid the foundation for dozens of research papers that have been able to answer some of these really challenging questions at the intersection of energy systems and machine learning.

This year, Bradbury is leading a Bass Connections project team, A Wider Lens on Energy: Adapting Deep Learning Techniques to Inform Energy Access Decisions, which builds on the work of last summer’s related Data+ project.

Video by the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke (iiD)

Data+ Students Present Findings at Durham City Hall on Local Eviction Trends

Sarah Dwyer
Miezo.
Data+ Durham Evictions member Samantha Miezio presents her team’s findings to the Durham City Council and County Commission. (Photo: Ariel Dawn)

Over the summer of 2019, DataWorks NC sponsored a Duke Data+ project with the Rhodes Information Initiative to examine eviction data in Durham, and identify trends that could guide Durham City and County Government and other stakeholders in deciding which interventions would be most effective for Durham community members facing eviction from their homes.

Undergraduates Ellis Ackerman (Math, NCSU), Rodrigo Araujo (Computer Science, Duke), and Samantha Miezio (Public Policy, Duke) spent ten weeks with project manager Libby McClure building tools to help understand the scope, cause, and effects of evictions in Durham County. Using eviction data recorded by the Durham County Sheriff’s Department and demographic data from the American Community Survey, the team investigated relationships between rent and evictions, created cost-benefit models for eviction diversion efforts, and built interactive visualizations of eviction trends.

On October 8, Miezio and McClure presented their findings at a joint meeting of the Durham City Council and County Commission. Among the team’s findings are that the month of January has more evictions than any other month in the last seven years. Minorities and others at a disadvantage experience a significantly higher rate of evictions than whites do, and that rent increases are followed by an increase in eviction rates about two months later. Over the past 15 years, there has been an average of over 29 evictions filings per day in Durham, resulting in a housing crisis that also strains other support networks in the city.

Graphs.

Eviction has multiple negative consequences that affect the entire community, including increased mental health issues, loss of employment, and displacement of children from their schools. It becomes harder to find another place to rent, since the eviction is on record. Evictions cause strain and added expense for other social services such as homeless shelters, hospital emergency rooms, food banks, and other support networks working with limited resources.

The team is now focusing on possible interventions that would help reduce evictions and divert those at risk to other programs that can help. They are investigating the potential benefits and limitations of policies like Universal Right to Counsel in Durham, which was recently adopted in New York City and Philadelphia.

“Tenants are not guaranteed legal representation in civil court as they are in criminal court,” says Miezio. “If someone is being evicted because they can’t afford rent, it’s probable that they can’t afford a lawyer to represent them. Ninety-five percent of tenants who show up in court don’t have lawyers. Many times, the evictions filed against them are unjust or unlawful. A common theme I heard this summer from meeting with lawyers from Legal Aid is that some tenants get evicted after requesting maintenance in the home if it has serious safety and health concerns. A lawyer could defend the tenant by arguing the defense of retaliatory eviction or even affirmative habitability claims. Lawyers can also help the tenant get more time to relocate in lieu of having an eviction judgment placed on the tenant’s record. Universal right to counsel has the potential to promote a basic human right of legal representation in court and provide a more fair legal process for tenants.”

Pie chart.

The audience was impressed with the work the Data+ team did this summer, although the results have led to more questions that will need to be answered before moving forward on potential policy changes. The team is working with City and County officials to refine their parameters and drill down into the causes behind evictions.

“I’m always grateful to have good data to help guide my policy choices, but of course we have limited resources at the city to gather and analyze data for the many issues we try to address. Having a partnership with Duke’s Data+ program helps give us the information we need to understand what’s happening in our community better and make better decision as policymakers,” said Mayor Pro Tempore and At Large Council Member Jillian Johnson.

In September, the City of Durham, Duke University, the North Carolina Community Development Initiative, Self-Help, and SunTrust jointly announced the launch of the Durham Affordable Housing Loan Fund (DAHLF), which seeks to aid affordable housing developers in addressing the critical shortage of affordable multifamily and single-family housing in the Bull City. Developers for low- to middle-income housing often can’t compete with the larger development firms that have been changing the landscape of downtown Durham. These loans will help to level the playing field, and hopefully allow some residents to stay in place.

By Ariel Dawn; originally posted on the Rhodes iiD website

Migration’s Many Forms: Finding Creative Ways to Examine the Movement of Populations

Sarah Dwyer
Migration Lab faculty and student photos.
Directors, teaching and graduate assistants, and fellows of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab (top row: Charlotte Sussman, Tsitsi Jaji, Domenika Baran, Jarvis McInnis, Corina Stan; second row: Sasha Panaram, Karen Little, Sonia Nayak, Catherine Lee, Isabella Arbelaez; third row: Jessica Covill, Kelsey Desir, Nicole Higgins, Jared Junkin, Dana Johnson; bottom row: Andrew Kim, Trisha Remetir, Hannah Borenstein, Grant Glass, Anna Tybinko)

A few years ago, two associate professors in Duke’s English Department started a reading group to explore their shared interest in human mobility and its cultural expressions. Building on their discussions, Charlotte Sussman and Tsitsi Jaji teamed up with fellow faculty members Dominika Baran, Jarvis McInnis, and Corina Stan to direct the Representing Migration Humanities Lab.

The lab received support from Humanities Unbounded, a five-year initiative funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant.

“We were lucky to have some great graduate students as part of the group convening the lab,” Sussman says. “They made me really enjoy working collaboratively.”

Sussman is the author of Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 and Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Based on her positive experience with the lab, she says she “started looking for different kinds of pedagogies and also opportunities for graduate students.”

Fifteen students have served as Representing Migration fellows, teaching assistants, or graduate lab assistants. Others have taken part in courses and research with faculty.

One of the lab’s projects explored Migration Memorials. Around the same time, over at the Duke Marine Lab, Cindy Van Dover’s lab was studying the impact of seabed mining. “It occurred to them that [mining] grants from the International Seabed Authority were close to the path of the Middle Passage,” Sussman says. Van Dover’s lab became interested in proposing a memorial to victims of the trans-Atlantic voyages that brought enslaved Africans to the New World.

Phillip Turner, a Ph.D. student in Marine Science and Conservation, convened a meeting with a wide range of experts, including Sussman. “They knew about the geography but were curious how the Middle Passage was recorded or memorialized,” she says.

Phillip Turner (second from left) with Aline Jaeckel, Diva Amon, and Jessica Perelman at the 25th Session of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica.
Phillip Turner (second from left) with Aline Jaeckel, Diva Amon, and Jessica Perelman at the 25th Session of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica

Turner organized a coauthored article on ways to commemorate the enslaved people who came to rest on the Atlantic seabed. In 2018, he received a Graduate Student Training Enhancement Grant to attend a meeting of the International Seabed Authority, where he networked and discussed the Middle Passage project. “The project was positively received,” he reported, “and it will hopefully be discussed in more detail at subsequent ISA sessions once the manuscript has been published.”

Kaylee Alexander.
Kaylee Alexander

Sussman had an idea to explore the Middle Passage from a new angle and involve more students through a Data+ summer research project. To help prepare the project, doctoral student Kaylee Alexander (Art, Art History & Visual Studies) worked with Duke Libraries’ Data and Visualization Services as a Humanities Unbounded Graduate Assistant.

“One of the original goals of the project was to use data representing nearly 36,000 transatlantic slave voyages to see if it would be possible to map a reasonable location for a deep-sea memorial to the transatlantic slave trade,” Alexander reflected. “The promises of these data were great; we just had to figure out how to use them.”

Sussman’s Data+ team set out to locate where and why enslaved Africans died during the sea voyage and analyze patterns of these mortality rates.

Chudi Zong, Ethan Czerniecki, Daisy Zhan, Charlotte Sussman, and Emma Davenport at the Data+ poster session.
Chudi Zong, Ethan Czerniecki, Daisy Zhan, Charlotte Sussman, and Emma Davenport at the Data+ poster session

“It’s been really interesting to fill in the gaps of the Middle Passage and search for patterns,” said Chudi Zhong, a master’s student in Statistical Science. “There is a lot of missing data, and we’ve used current technology to fill gaps. For example, using the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, we can find records on how many enslaved people died. The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans has other kinds of data for ships. We merged the two databases and found 35 matching voyages. Then we used our own model to make predictions.”

Dutch Slaving Voyages (1751-1795): The height of each bar corresponds to the average number of deaths per 150km2 grid. The color of the bar corresponds to the number of ship locations recorded in each grid. [From the Data+ team’s executive summary].
Dutch Slaving Voyages (1751-1795): The height of each bar corresponds to the average number of deaths per 150km2 grid. The color of the bar corresponds to the number of ship locations recorded in each grid. [From the Data+ team’s executive summary]
As an undergraduate majoring in Philosophy and Global Cultural Studies, Ethan Czerniecki said the Data+ project “gave me a different way of approaching these topics outside the humanities that proved to be expansive,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought to treat these individuals as data points, but [the data science approach] opens up new areas like data visualization. Combining a humanities project with data science is really interesting, and the methodologies interact well.”

Prediction of 2,164 trans-Atlantic voyage paths that ended in the northern hemisphere based on the LSTM model; inset map:  prediction of 36 trans-Atlantic voyage paths based on the LSTM model, all of which have reasonably smooth lines. [From the Data+ team’s executive summary].
Prediction of 2,164 trans-Atlantic voyage paths that ended in the northern hemisphere based on the LSTM model; inset map:  prediction of 36 trans-Atlantic voyage paths based on the LSTM model, all of which have reasonably smooth lines. [From the Data+ team’s executive summary]
English Ph.D. student Emma Davenport served as project manager for the Data+ team. “This was my first experience in a real mentorship role,” she said. “It’s different than being part of a team doing the research. Being a mentor calls for a different set of skills and a different orientation.” Davenport is going on the job market this year. “Job committees want to see that you have a set of skills for guiding undergraduate research,” she said, “and both academic and nonacademic jobs are looking for candidates with a well-rounded skillset. I couldn’t have gotten this experience from traditional teaching and research.”

This fall, a Bass Connections project team is continuing the work of the Representing Migration lab and the Data+ project. Doctoral students in English and Romance Studies and undergraduates representing at least six majors are collaborating with faculty and librarians. Some students are creating a map showing where the deaths occurred in the Atlantic; their original data will support a proposal for the Middle Passage memorial.

Also in this academic year, six graduate and undergraduate students will serve as Representing Migration Humanities Fellows.

“I think these opportunities are really great,” says Sussman. “Duke is not a heavy teaching school, at least for English, relative to other Ph.D. programs, but I think what Duke can offer grad students is more unique. This kind of work is useful to them professionally, whether they go into academia or not.”

In addition to the opportunities she has found to engage students in research on migration, Sussman has tapped into other Duke programs as well.

Undergraduates Clifford Haley, Eli Kline, and Bailey Bogle present “Pirating Texts” at the 2019 Story+ Research Symposium. Photo: Jennifer R. Zhou.
Undergraduates Clifford Haley, Eli Kline, and Bailey Bogle present “Pirating Texts” at the 2019 Story+ Research Symposium. Photo: Jennifer R. Zhou

Grant Glass used a Data Expeditions grant to create a data visualization module for Sussman’s course, Queens of Antiquity. A doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill, Glass also served as project manager on Sussman’s 2018 Data+ project, Pirating Texts, and as graduate mentor on the 2019 Story+ summer research project of the same name.

Most recently, English Ph.D. student Kimberley Dimitriadis received an Archival Expeditions grant to create a module for Sussman’s medical humanities course, Doctors’ Stories.

“Using this [kind of approach] in your classroom setting involves letting go of authority, and sometimes that works better than others,” says Sussman. “You have to be willing to let go.”

Learn more at a free lunchtime event on December 4 at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, featuring Charlotte Sussman and colleagues.

Current Opportunities and Deadlines

Rhodes iiD Invites Faculty Proposals for Data+ Summer Projects

Sarah Dwyer

Data+ proposals RFP.

Deadline: November 4, 2019

Data+ is a ten-week summer research experience for undergraduates interested in exploring data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary challenges.

Students join small teams and work alongside other teams in a communal environment. They learn how to marshal, analyze, and visualize data, while gaining broad exposure to the field of data science. In Summer 2019 there were 30 Data+ teams working together in Gross Hall.

Data+ is offered through the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke (iiD) and is part of the Bass Connections Information, Society & Culture theme. The program runs from mid-May until the end of July. During this time, students are required to contribute to the team full-time and may not take classes or have other employment.

Request for Proposals

We invite proposals for faculty-sponsored Data+ projects in Summer 2020. We are especially interested in proposals that involve a partner from outside the academy or a faculty member from a different discipline. We also encourage proposals that involve previously untested ideas or unanalyzed datasets, and we hope that the Data+ team can make a contribution with important proof-of-principle work that may lead to more substantial faculty work and/or connections in the future. We also welcome proposals that will lead to the undergraduates creating tools that might be used in the classroom or facilitate community engagement with data and data-driven questions.

Opportunity to submit a joint proposal for a year-long Bass Connections project and a Summer 2020 Data+ project: Interested faculty may propose a Data+ project connected to a year-long Bass Connections project by completing the Bass Connections RFP (to be released on Sept. 3 and due Nov. 4). Please be prepared to articulate how you will connect the Data+ project with the year-long project. Funding decisions will be made by each program individually, so it is possible that your proposal may be accepted for only Data+ or only Bass Connections. Please contact Laura Howes if you have questions or want to discuss how other faculty have connected these experiences in the past.

Data+ Application Format

To apply, please prepare a document (three pages maximum) that responds to the following prompts, ideally in this order.

Name of project: Please use a short name that succinctly describes the nature of the project and is not overly technical. If your project is selected for Data+, this title will be used for the project web page and project listings.

Summary: Please write a project summary, including the basic ideas behind the proposal.

Faculty leads: Data+ is especially interested in projects that connect faculty from different disciplines, as well as projects that enable faculty to branch out in new directions. Please describe the intended faculty leads and the expected benefits from their participation.

Mentoring: Day-to-day faculty involvement in Data+ is not expected. Instead, each Data+ project has a mentor, usually a graduate student or postdoc, who is on hand to give the student team more focused guidance. The time commitment tends to be five to seven hours per week, and funding is generally available to cover the mentor’s time.

If you have a mentor in mind, please indicate who this is and why s/he is well suited. If you do not, please describe the skills you would like this person to have (we are generally able to find faculty-mentor matches).

Goals: Describe the intended goals and products of the project, in the following manner:

  • Describe entirely reachable goals that you fully expect the students to achieve: these could be answers to a question, explorations of a hypothesis, or other things of that nature.
  • Describe a tangible product the students will create in the course of their research, which ideally will be of use both to further researchers at the university and to the students as something they can show off to future employers or graduate schools. This could be, for example, a good piece of well-commented software, or a visualization device, or a detailed curation of previously raw data.
  • Describe a more outrageous goal that you would be quite (pleasantly!) surprised to see the students achieve, along with a plan for them to build a potential roadmap toward that goal. For example, this goal might only be reachable if you had data that you currently do not have, and the students might build a speculative roadmap toward acquiring that data

Data: Most Data+ projects involve analysis of datasets. Some of these are publically available, and some are not. As it is essential that students be able to analyze the needed data for the project, we are very interested in plans to ensure that this will happen. Please address this in the following manner:

  • For each dataset that will be analyzed by the student team, please give a high-level description of the dataset (what’s in it, how was it collected and for which purpose, how large is it, etc.).
  • For each dataset, indicate whether you anticipate IRB approval will be needed for student access, and if not, why not. If IRB approval will be needed, indicate whether a protocol already exists and describe your plan for incorporating the student involvement. If it does not already exist, please describe your plan (including a timeline) for obtaining one.
  • For each dataset, indicated whether it is owned and/or is being provided by an outside party. If so, please describe the intended path toward ensuring that students will be granted the ability to access the dataset (we are often able to assist in crafting Data Use Agreements with outside parties, for example).

Outside partners: Some of the best Data+ projects have had a partner from outside the university. This might be someone who is invested in the data or the questions, and to whom the students will in essence deliver analysis and insight. Ideally, this partner will be able to come to Gross Hall two or three times during the summer to hear updates from the students and provide feedback.

For each such partner, please describe their expected interest in the project, how much they would interact with the team, whether or not they’d be able to contribute funds towards student stipends, and also identify a point of contact for this partner.

Deadline and Contact

The deadline for submitting this application is November 4, 2019, 5:00 p.m. Please email your completed application to Ariel Dawn. If you would like help in developing your proposal, please contact Paul Bendich.

Duke Honored for Durham Research Partnerships through Bass Connections and Data+ Programs

Sarah Dwyer

Laylon Williams, Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, Elijah Bazemore.

Nicole Schramm-Sapyta named Volunteer of the Year at Durham Crisis Intervention Team Awards Banquet; Data+ and Bass Connections in Brain & Society honored as Community Partner Agencies of the Year

Nicole Schramm-Sapyta of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences researches addiction. In the summer of 2016, she began working with a Duke Bass Connections Brain & Society team to learn more about the opiate epidemic in Durham. In Bass Connections teams, students and faculty address real-world problems through research, creativity, and collaboration with external partners.

Interested in the local law-enforcement perspective on drug use, they met with members of the Durham Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT). CIT members are police officers and other first responders who have received extensive special training to respond to citizens in crisis, often due to underlying behavioral health issues such as addiction or mental illness. More than 950 first responders in Durham have been CIT-trained since 2007.

“A third of people in our jails have mental health issues. It’s great to have Duke and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences on board, because we need the research, we need our work to be evidence-based, because people’s lives are at stake.” –Wendy Jacobs, Durham County Board of Commissioners Chair

When Schramm-Sapyta and her students first met with the CIT officers, a one-hour meeting stretched to more than two hours of open, honest discussion. The students asked hard questions and the officers responded with experience, policy information, and honesty. The Bass Connections students were so impressed that they wanted to spread the word. They organized two CIT presentations on campus and three Mental Health First Aid training sessions, the latter completed by more than 100 members of the Duke community.

Schramm-Sapyta and students were encouraged to return and brainstorm with CIT members about ways Duke could support the program. They learned the CIT had lots of data on 9-1-1 calls but no one to analyze it and make it useful to CIT. Schramm-Sapyta connected with Paul Bendich, Associate Professor of Math and Data+ leader, and thus was born the first Data+/CIT project, “Mental Health Interventions by Durham Police.”

Data+, run by Duke’s Rhodes Information Initiative, is a 10-week summer research experience for undergraduates interested in exploring new data-driven approaches to complex challenges.

Schramm-Sapyta described the successful Data+/CIT collaboration on Dec. 7 during her keynote remarks at CIT’s 11th Annual Recognition Banquet, held at the Durham Human Services Complex. Data+ and Bass Connections in Brain & Society were named “Community Partner Agency of the Year,” and Schramm-Sapyta was honored as “Volunteer of the Year.”

CIT honorees.The annual event recognizes “Exemplary and Dedicated Work of Durham County’s CIT First Responders,” according to the program. Sponsors included National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Durham and Alliance Behavioral Healthcare. Teshéa Grant, Public Information Officer for Durham County Emergency Medical Services (EMS), served as Mistress of Ceremonies.

Team members from EMS, the Sheriff’s Department, DPD, Duke University and N.C. Central University Police departments, Durham Emergency Communications, and Durham Technical Community College also were honored.

Local officials attending included City of Durham Mayor Steve Schewel, Durham County Board of Commissioners Chair Wendy Jacobs, and current and former Durham County Sheriffs Clarence Birkhead and Mike Andrews. Len White, Associate Professor of Neurology and DIBS Associate Director for Education, attended as co-leader of the Bass Connections Brain & Society theme, which DIBS manages.

Officials made clear how important it is to understand the links between people with mental health issues, local law enforcement, and incarceration. “A third of people in our jails have mental health issues,” Jacobs said. “It’s great to have Duke and DIBS on board, because we need the research, we need our work to be evidence-based, because people’s lives are at stake.”

“This is a fantastic example of the potential for really deep, enduring partnerships between Duke and local institutions and law enforcement in Durham.” –Ed Balleisen, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies

Bendich told event attendees he loves to expose students to really hard problems and to professionals who are working on the problems. “Technical excellence is important but more important is whether you’re able to explain your solutions to people on the ‘pointy end’ of these hard problems,” he said. “To do so, you have to craft a story and make it believable, compelling. Projects like this one are beautiful examples.” On a personal note, he added, “I’m a child of two mental health professionals, so this project is especially meaningful to me.”

The Data+ team’s first project was to analyze 9-1-1 calls between 2011 and 2016 and determine if there were any patterns related to CIT-tagged calls—and indeed there were! Behavioral health-related calls typically peak on Wednesdays between 8 a.m. and noon, (“Hump Day is real,” said Schramm-Sapyta), but are sparse on Sunday mornings between 4 and 8 a.m.—information CIT could then use to deploy resources.

Students also looked at various areas of the city regarding the number of CIT calls. “Not surprisingly,” Schramm-Sapyta said, “the poorest areas of our city are the greatest utilizers of CIT services.” That’s good news in that it suggests citizens are familiar with CIT and its services, and the services are going where they are most needed, she pointed out. “It also suggests the need for greater mental health services in these areas, so that crises can be averted.”

In 2017, a second Data+ project looked at whether CIT was helping reduce recidivism, i.e., how often convicted criminals are returning to jail after they have been released. Those identified as having a behavioral health issue are much more likely to return to jail, Schramm-Sapyta noted. This time, data were provided by the Durham County Sheriff’s Office and the Durham County Jail.

“Before CIT existed, recidivism was on the rise in Durham,” Schramm-Sapyta said. “As CIT was first established, and the program began to grow, recidivism leveled off.” In the most recent five years, as CIT and Durham have grown rapidly, and other mental health services at the jail and in the community have increased, recidivism has dropped sharply, she noted.

Ed Balleisen, Duke’s Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, oversees DIBS and Bass Connections. He emphasized the special nature of the Data+ and Bass Connections projects linked to the Durham community.

“This is a fantastic example of the potential for really deep, enduring partnerships between Duke and local institutions and law enforcement in the city and county of Durham,” he said. “These projects allow pursuit of significant research questions that can inform decision-making and deploy the creativity of Duke’s faculty and students in partnership with local institutions to carry out that research and present it, with an eye toward allowing decision-makers to see their world more clearly and have a better sense of what’s working and what isn’t,” Balleisen added.

Schramm-Sapyta ended her Dec. 7 remarks by thanking the Bass Connections Brain & Society Theme and the Data+ program—and especially the CIT. “I’ve learned Durham is a great place to live, and CIT is a big part of that greatness.”

Originally posted on the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences website

Photos: Laylon Williams of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Durham, Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, Elijah Bazemore of the Durham County Sheriff’s Office Detention Services Division (courtesy of Williams); CIT honorees, including representatives Len White and Paul Bendich, standing at left, and Schramm-Sapyta, seated in center

Check Out the 2019 Data+ Projects and Apply to Join a Team This Summer

Sarah Dwyer

Data+ team members.

Deadline: February 25, 2019

Data+ is a ten-week summer research experience for undergraduates and master’s students interested in exploring new data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary challenges. It is suitable for students at all levels and from all majors.

Students join small teams (a maximum of three undergraduates and one master’s student) and work alongside other teams in a communal environment. They learn how to marshal, analyze and visualize data, while gaining broad exposure to the field of data science.

The program runs from late May through late July each year, with the application deadline in February. Participants receive a stipend. Students come from a variety of backgrounds, majors and levels of experience with coding. Through collaboration, they use data analysis to solve problems across disciplines.

Data+ is offered through the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke and is part of the Bass Connections Information, Society & Culture theme.

Apply Now for Summer 2019

Data+ 2019 runs from May 28 through August 3, 2019. We are currently accepting applications via this link. The application deadline is February 25, but we will evaluate applications on a rolling basis, so please get your application in as soon as you can.

Participants receive a $5,000 stipend for this full-time research experience, out of which they must arrange their own housing and travel. Participants may not accept employment or take classes during the program; this requirement is strictly enforced and nonnegotiable.

Browse the projects below, and come to the Data+ Information Fair on January 17 at 3:00 p.m. to learn more and meet the project leads.

2019 Projects

Code+

At the fair, students will also have the opportunity to talk with the 2019 project leads for the new Code+ program, and learn more about projects for summer 2019. Code+ projects are paid internships that focus on application/product development, while Data+ projects are stipend-based and focus on learning to marshal, analyze, and visualize data from a wide spectrum of sources.

Duke Researchers Are Developing Market and Policy Solutions for Global Energy Access

Sarah Dwyer

Village in Uganda using solar to power refrigerators by Duke University student Andrew Seelaus

Access to modern and reliable energy is something that most of the world takes for granted. But many around the world are living a different reality.

Across sub-Saharan Africa and India, children often complete homework by the flicker of candles and kerosene lamps as wisps of smoke trickle up around them from the stoking of the fire beneath their cooking stove.

Smoky homes and candle-lit homework sessions are the norm for billions without access to modern energy.

We are at a critical moment. Innovative business models, financing arrangements, and policy reforms are coming together in a way that has the potential to eliminate global energy poverty

The Duke University Energy Access Project aims to help achieve the United Nation’s (U.N.) seventh Sustainable Development Goal, which is to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services by 2030. This new research and policy platform at Duke takes an interdisciplinary approach to developing market and policy solutions for the 1 billion who are still without electricity, another billion lacking reliable electricity, and the more than 3 billion people currently without access to clean cooking technologies.

“We are at a critical moment,” said Jonathan Phillips, Energy Access Project director. “Innovative business models, financing arrangements, and policy reforms are coming together in a way that has the potential to eliminate global energy poverty. The next three years are key to shifting the trajectory to give us a shot at achieving Sustainable Development Goal 7. Duke has much to contribute to this fight.”

Establishing the Energy Access Project

The Energy Access Project was established in late 2017 with a $1.5 million gift from Jim Rogers, former CEO and chairman of the board for the electric utility company Duke Energy, and his wife, M.A. Rogers. The Bass Connections Challenge at Duke University added $750,000 in matching funds to support the project’s goal of accelerating deployment of sustainable energy and empowering the world through expanded energy access. Key Duke collaborators in this effort include the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, the Duke University Energy Initiative, the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Bass Connections.

The idea for the Energy Access Project began long before 2017, with a two-year collaboration between Jim Rogers and Nicholas Institute director Tim Profeta. Rogers, a long-time advocate for universal electricity access and author of the book Lighting the World: Transforming Our Energy Future by Bringing Electricity to Everyone, served as a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke from 2014 to 2016 after retiring from his CEO post.

In 2015–2016, Rogers led a collaboration with Profeta and Tatjana Vujic, currently director of Biogas Strategy at Duke, which focused on off-grid electricity solutions. This Bass Connections project, a platform for giving students interdisciplinary experience addressing real-world problems, germinated the idea for the Energy Access Project. Vujic and the students created the initial version of the project proposal that Rogers and his wife would later fund.

Understanding the Issue of Modern Energy for All

The Energy Access Project launched in Washington, D.C., in February 2018, bringing together leaders from government, business, civil society, and academia to discuss the biggest barriers to energy access and how to overcome them.

Energy Access Project launch event in Washington, D.C., by Laurence Genon

One of the seven key themes was that more research is needed to strengthen our understanding of the way in which modern energy access relates to education, health, and food security outcomes. Collaborations between researchers and policy makers could facilitate effective planning for communities’ energy futures and help to mobilize local entrepreneurs.

There’s a big gap between what is being evaluated by scholars and the types of programs, projects, and policies being implemented.

With an international research collaborative, the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI), the Energy Access Project staff and students helped to review nearly 80,000 academic articles to map the existing research connecting energy access, technologies, and interventions to different impacts and development outcomes.

“The review points to a troubling pattern,” said Energy Access Project faculty director Subhrendu Pattanayak, who also leads SETI. “There’s a big gap between what is being evaluated by scholars and the types of programs, projects, and policies being implemented.”

This gap—between what we know and what we do—could keep the world from achieving a critical number of these Sustainable Development Goals, Pattanayak said, noting that we must make scientific evidence more practice based by training the next cadre of scholars an practitioners and encouraging impact evaluations of real-life projects, programs, and policy or risk being left in the dark.

Staff are taking on work to help researchers and decision makers make research more accessible to target audiences. In doing so, the project will drive a global research agenda focused on filling key knowledge gaps, in the process deepening our understanding of how energy access relates to other development outcomes. The Energy Access Project is convening researchers to lead integration of diverse disciplines, such as data analytics, with real world energy access applications using tools like satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.

Overcoming Policy, Market Barriers to Access

“Despite the increased interest in the idea of universal energy access, our policy makers and analysts have not quite caught up with the quick-moving world of the business models and financing piece,” said Profeta. “Because this is all so new, there’s a chance for great creative thought on how to get at this problem. Duke has the expertise and experience to find those unique solutions.”

Beyond its research focus, the Energy Access Project is working directly with policy makers on the design of key institutions and policies to support electrification as well as with companies and social enterprises to understand how innovative business models can help reach last-mile customers.

Despite the increased interest in the idea of universal energy access, our policy makers and analysts have not quite caught up with the quick-moving world of the business models and financing piece.

To help the U.S. Congress navigate emerging market financing reform options, Energy Access Project staff assembled an analysis of how a new, more fully-equipped American development finance institution could help fill the global energy financing gap.

Hannah Girardeau, Marc Jeuland, Jonathan Phillips

In their policy brief, released in June 2018 as the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act (BUILD Act) legislation continued to move closer to passage in Congress, Energy Access Project staff found that the United States is not fully harnessing the power of private sector-led development, leaving U.S. foreign policy gains—and U.S. Treasury profits—on the table and businesses without the capital to build modern energy systems and other underpinnings of development.

“If just 7 percent of global power investments were focused on where 14 percent of the population lives, universal electrification could be achieved by 2030,” Phillips said, noting the lack of early-stage concessional capital to get projects adequately developed, de-risked, and ready for debt investment. “More risk-appetite capital is needed to mobilize the larger pools of money available through private equity funds, development finance institutions, and other investors.”

The ultimate goal of this effort is to equip governments, investors, and developers to dramatically accelerate rural electrification in an integrated manner, unlocking new economic opportunities for millions of households.

Entirely new energy delivery platforms have the potential to power remote villages many miles from the existing grid. The Energy Access Project is collaborating with CrossBoundary Energy and the Rockefeller Foundation on a new Mini-Grid Innovation Lab to help refine one of these promising models. The partnership is testing innovative new business models for deploying off-grid mini-grids in order to improve the economics of mini-grids and better understand how rural low-income customers can best be served.

“The ultimate goal of this effort is to equip governments, investors, and developers to dramatically accelerate rural electrification in an integrated manner, unlocking new economic opportunities for millions of households,” Ashvin Dayal, Rockefeller Foundation associate vice president and managing director for Smart Power, said in an interview with Solar Magazine about the lab.

Students as Engines of Innovation

The Energy Access Project is interested in “supporting the bubbling ecosystem of ideas and collaboration that’s happening at Duke and around the world,” said Phillips, and mobilizing students is “central to this work.”

The project supports relevant courses, internships, and campus events that build linkages between the Duke student and faculty community and the energy access practitioner and policymaking community.

A commercial area of Dehli, India, by T. Robert Fetter

Shortly after its launch, the Energy Access Project sponsored and helped to judge the Energy in Emerging Markets Case Competition in partnership with M-KOPA Solar. The competition attracted 45 student teams from around the world to focus their business and problem-solving acumen on a real-world challenge facing one of the leading companies in the solar home system sector in Africa.

“The competition helped M-KOPA’s leadership team think through credible options for addressing a difficult regulatory and business model issue while giving hundreds of students an opportunity to wrestle with questions of technology, policy, and community development in an important and rapidly developing sector,” Phillips said.

The Energy Access Project is also supporting Duke science students’ efforts to create an energy access data platform. Through the Duke Data+ program, a team of undergraduates is working closely with Power for All, a leading energy access research and policy nonprofit, to develop machine learning and natural language processing tools to improve visualization of data and information on energy access in developing countries.

“This project is different than other projects I’ve worked on because we are working with an outside client to come up with a solution to a problem which does not already exist,” said Brooke Erickson, a member of the three-person Duke student team. “I feel as though I am truly creating new knowledge and new algorithms instead of just understanding existing algorithms.”

The effort ties into Power for All’s Platform for Energy Access Knowledge (PEAK), which automatically curates, organizes, and streamlines large, growing bodies of information into sharable, data-driven stories for policy makers and researchers alike. The students consult with Power for All to creatively visualize PEAK’s library—using artificial intelligence—to create more effective science communication.

This experience has taught me that there are ways to use computer science and data analytics in every interdisciplinary field.

For these students, the research is allowing them to apply their skills in ways they never thought possible.

“Since I am not specifically studying energy or the environment, it has been extremely eye-opening to work with Power for All and the Energy Access Project,” said Erickson, who is studying economics and computer science. “I have learned about the dire need to expand energy access globally and feel as though I am able to contribute to solving that problem despite my lack of background knowledge in the area. This experience has taught me that there are ways to use computer science and data analytics in every interdisciplinary field.”

By Erin McKenzie; originally posted on the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Studies website. Work on this project is funded by Jim and M.A. Rogers and the Bass Connections Challenge.

Images: Village in Uganda using solar to power refrigerators by Duke University student Andrew Seelaus; Energy Access Project launch event in Washington, D.C., by Laurence Genon; Hannah Girardeau, Marc Jeuland, and Jonathan Phillips; a commercial area of Dehli, India, by T. Robert Fetter

Bass Connections Invites Proposals for Interdisciplinary Team-based Research Projects

Sarah Dwyer

Bass Connections RFP

Deadline: November 5, 2018

Bass Connections is now accepting proposals for 2019-2020 team-based research projects that engage faculty, undergraduates and graduate/professional students in interdisciplinary exploration of big, unanswered questions about major societal challenges.

Please see the project proposal guidelines. The deadline is November 5 at 5:00 p.m.

Projects may be proposed in relation to one or more of the five broad, interdisciplinary themes of Bass Connections, or to Bass Connections Open – a special channel that invites proposals that align with the model of Bass Connections but otherwise fall outside the parameters of the existing themes.

This is the second, and final, year in which proposals will be accepted through Bass Connections Open. Bass Connections Open is not a permanent feature of the program, but rather an experimental channel that we anticipate opening approximately every five years as a means of identifying percolating areas of interest not addressed by the current themes.

Special Opportunities for 2019-2020

When completing a proposal, faculty will also have the opportunity to take advantage of the following opportunities. Please note that applying for these opportunities will not increase your project budget, but rather may increase the likelihood that your project will be selected by allowing us to leverage funds designated for a specific purpose.

  • Submit a joint proposal for a year-long Bass Connections project and a Summer 2019 Story+ or Data+ project
  • Biodiversity Conservation
  • Energy Access
  • Ethics
  • Arts
  • Humanities

Laura Howes, director of Bass Connections, is available to answer questions. Faculty may also contact any of the Bass Connections theme leaders to discuss project ideas.

Learn More