SAS / Data4Good – Jay S & Evan Z – Page 2

Day 3

On day 3, Dr. Summerville and I sorted out all the technical difficulties so that there would no longer be any problems with communication and scheduling. I learned today that when you are accused of doing something that you didn’t do, its best to stay calm, apologize, and quickly try to explain everything as clearly as possible.

Today, we optimized the excel sheet I did and reduced all the unnecessary steps when filling out the excel sheet so that a volunteer would have the easiest time. My assignment was then to research any papers or articles about bacillus bacteria in maternal milk. I must find any papers that could be helpful or have any data which can help in out process so we can see if there are any trends.

Day 2

On day 2, I had some technical difficulties where I could not receive any of the emails Dr. Summerville had sent so we were not able to meet. I ended up continuing to look for the converters with free-trails but they all ended up not working. We then opted to not use converters and just take down data manually.

Day 3

Today, I researched studies in regenerative medicine, namely in cell culture media and bioreactors, to find a dataset not reliant on time series as Dr. Karmakar asked yesterday. As some unexpected meetings and conflicts came up, we didn’t have a video call as planned, but we kept up a correspondence via Teams on my progress and questions.

Some research:

Day 2

Today, I met up with Dr. Karmakar in the morning and gave a summary of my work yesterday. After a couple of notes, she assigned my next task: finding a dataset from one of the biomanufacturing processes I found that had numerous predictor variables and recreatable data. In the afternoon, I had another meeting with Dr. Karmakar, this time with her colleague Dr. Wendy Jiang. Dr. Jiang introduced me to one of their department’s current projects, creating an experiment to increase penicillin concentration, and showcased her current dataset and graphs using arbitrary numbers. Then, as she has a conflict tomorrow morning, Dr. Karmakar asked me to look for a dataset in regenerative medicine not dependent on a time series for tomorrow.

Dr. Jiang’s dataset and graphs:

Day 1

On day 1, I had a Teams meeting with Dr. Summerville to discuss the work I had done over the weekend. What I did was copy all the information, from the questions and answers, of four different donor forms for the WakeMed Mothers’ Milk Bank. We discussed the time it took and knew it was unreasonable to have a volunteer manually read the 2400 forms there are, so we tried to find a pdf to excel converter. All the free converters online made very hard to read sheets so we opted to find converters with a free trial or ones that may be more expensive.

When the mothers donate milk, all their milk is then mixed together and then sent to a lab. If the milk is tested positive for a specific bacteria, it is then disposed of. The goal is to extract data from these forms to then be able to use data analytics to help see what kinds of donors are more at risk of their milk containing a specific bacteria and then make the best possible mixture.

Day 0 – Prework

During the next 2 weeks, I will be working with Dr. Natalia Summerville from SAS on a Data4Good project which seeks to use data analytics in a way to help society instead of solely for profit. The project I will be helping seeks to aid in optimizing the maternal milk donation process. My prework was to look over 4 different donor forms and manually type out all the information into an excel sheet. Then, I had to research some free-online pdf to excel converters to see if I can streemline this process.

Day 1

Today was the first day of WEP. As I am working remotely, this morning, I had a Teams call with my host, Dr. Karmakar. After a quick introduction and some technical difficulties resulting in us turning off our cameras, Dr. Karmakar spoke about the basics of operations research and optimization and how they help people with real-world problems. Then, she explained her plan for me in the upcoming weeks, starting with setting up a demo presentation in biomanufacturing. To help prepare this pitch, today, Dr. Karmakar had me research biomanufacturing applications and processes, along with identifying challenges in the field. I will present my research to her tomorrow morning at our next meeting.

Meeting:

Some research:

Day 0

During the next two weeks, I will be following senior operations research specialist Dr. Nabaruna Karmakar at SAS. Additionally, SAS is also a part of the Data4good movement, which applies data analytics to humanitarian movements. I’m looking forward to the upcoming weeks to explore how a company like SAS uses data analytics for both internal business needs, along with broader social ones.