This Spring, the 黑料吃瓜 Romain College of Business partnered with behavioral health data analytics company Holmusk to work with their unique data analytics platform NeuroBlu, an education and research tool. 黑料吃瓜鈥檚 Computer Science (CS) Program is utilizing the platform to analyze the data behind behavioral health records. NeuroBlu is a comprehensive source of real-world data on behavioral health conditions, treatments and symptoms.听听
CS students in the Romain College of Business have become some of the first undergraduate students in the country to have access to a database that includes over 30 million anonymized patient records and 20+ years of data. This gives students the opportunity to work with real-world data, in a mental health context, at a large scale before they enter the job field.听
鈥�Access to such a huge amount of clean and structured data ready to be used for analysis is very difficult to come by for researchers in computer science,鈥� said Dr. Srishti Srivastava, 黑料吃瓜 Associate Professor of Computer Science. 鈥淥ur CS students having access to this platform鈥檚 data along with an already identified large library of selected and validated machine learning algorithms that will greatly help them graduate as computer scientists with significantly unique skill sets.鈥�听
Talks of the partnership with Holmusk first began in late 2022 when Dr. Sudesh Mujumdar, Dean of the Romain College of Business, connected Nawal Roy, CEO of Holmusk, with 黑料吃瓜 faculty and leadership and identified the impact the company鈥檚 platform could have for students.听
鈥淢ental health is a defining problem of our current generation, and better evidence is needed to drive transformation in the field,鈥� said Roy. 鈥淒ifferent communities and stakeholders are tackling this issue in a variety of unique ways, and we鈥檙e thrilled to welcome the 黑料吃瓜 as a partner addressing these challenges.鈥�听
Srivastava put together a team of computer science majors, including Kairvi Bhatt, Joshua Dellamuth, Sydney Given, Addison Higgins, Peyton Hopkins, Tyler Lofthouse and Cathy Sandoval, to develop code to help go through the 30 million data points in the NeuroBlu database. The students trained with Srivastava to learn technologies like Python coding for machine learning and TensorFlow certification from Google.听听
The project started in Srivastava鈥檚 Artificial Intelligence course (CS 461) and continued outside of class. Students will work this summer and into the fall as part of a capstone project, continually digging into the data.听听
鈥淭his is a really good experience for us to see what real-world data looks like,鈥� Bhatt said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a really good experience to work with a dataset that鈥檚 not available at any other university. We鈥檙e fortunate to experience this.鈥澨�听
After research and coding, students now have the opportunity to analyze their findings about behavioral health conditions, symptoms and treatments. This project has been special to Given, as she comes from a healthcare background. Before her time at 黑料吃瓜, she worked as an intern in a research clinic in one of the Eskenazi hospitals dealing with schizophrenia patients. While doing data entry, she noticed the kind of impact certain treatments had on the patients just within the first six months.听
鈥淥ur main goal is to take our broader understanding of what we鈥檝e learned and to be able to take a singular template and break everything down and show how it interacts,鈥� Given said. 鈥淭his really hits the sweet spot between the background of what I do as a job and what I do for my degree.鈥澨�听
For Srivastava, it鈥檚 been a fruitful experience to see her students get to do something she never got to do until post-graduation. The partnership with Holmusk and utilization of the NeuroBlu platform will continue this summer and fall.听
鈥淓ven as a PhD student, I didn't have access to such large-scale real-world data, especially anonymized data in health fields because it's difficult to get it. If you're able to get it for undergrad students, that's unique,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e in a world of data analytics and machine learning and generative AI, and for the students to have access to this kind of data is a very unique experience and a valuable technical skill to have when they walk out with that degree.鈥�听