I have conducted research for and supported many quantitative and qualitative analytics projects over the years, including determining competitive social media efficacy, conducting social network analyses from survey data, and creating a comprehensive regression model to forecast enrollment patterns on both a micro and macro level.

Apart from teasing out the key insights from a large data set that initially might seem random and chaotic, I am most passionate about figuring out how to tell a compelling story from the data because it challenges me every time and forces me to think outside the box.

The biggest challenge by far that I face in data analytics is cleaning the data. Often the data that we get is messy or has not been collected in the way that we want (or is missing key aspects that we need for the analysis). For example, when doing the social network analysis with Gephi, we ran into several roadblocks when converting the XML files into CSV files readable by Gephi.

The ROL team congratulates Ryo on his Graduation and wishes him good luck for his next adventure.

The presentation about our laboratory work at Salesforce Higher Education Summit in Austin, Texas is now available at the link.

Currently, I am a Graduate Research Assistant at the lab. I have analyzed text in participants’ applications and built both a B2B model and individual enrollment prediction model.

My passion about data analytics is using my research work to find the story behind data. I can translate scientific ideas into my findings and make understandable insights.

The biggest challenge I have faced in data analytics is applying the theoretical methodology I have learned in class to real-world data and build the model. Fitting different models and finding which one is the best to describe real-world trends is challenging and exciting.

Analytics means being one with data. And working with data gives one a thorough and extensive understanding of the entire business and all related processes. My experience at the lab has taught me immensely – from learning the internal processes in the education industry to learning new software and analytical techniques for various analyses. Yoshie’s guidance has proven to be immensely useful throughout the journey.

A British economist once said that if one tortures data enough, it will confess. These confessions jumping onto us teach us a lot about the consumer’s thought process and how he interacts on various fronts before making an important decision. It is such insights derived from data and building a story connecting them that really excite me and drag me to work every morning.

There is an ocean of data surrounding us and various things can be explored if data is viewed from various angles. It is a challenge to not lose sight of the task at hand. Data pouring over from many different sources adds to the challenge.

This last Friday, the Return on Learning Lab’s own Yoshie Tomozumi spoke at the Salesforce HE Summit at the Hilton Austin on serving learners better through data analytics. Thanks for all those who came out!