In one sec­tion of Snell Library’s Dig­ital Media Com­mons on Monday after­noon, a large com­puter screen dis­played a daz­zling visu­al­iza­tion of a hypo­thet­ical out­break of a flu-​​like dis­ease orig­i­nating in Chicago. In another sec­tion of the room, vis­i­tors tested out an inter­ac­tive health coaching game designed to guide older adults through exer­cise rou­tines and pro­vide real-​​time feed­back. Else­where, dig­ital maps dis­played NASA satel­lite data used to detect trends in water avail­ability on a global scale.

These projects were among the many fea­tured at Northeastern’s sixth Pop Up Open Lab Expe­ri­ence and Recep­tion, where an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary group of fac­ulty and stu­dents pre­sented their inno­v­a­tive research that works with Big Data. The DMC served as a fit­ting host for the expo; located on Snell Library’s second floor, the cutting-​​edge work­space is a media lab and dig­ital cre­ativity center where stu­dents and fac­ulty can use a range of tech­nolo­gies such as new ani­ma­tion, audio and video editing, 3-​​D printing, and game-​​design software.

One area of the pop up lab fea­tured the work of net­work sci­en­tist Alessandro Vespig­nani, the Stern­berg Family Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Physics, and his team at Northeastern’s MoBS Lab. They have devel­oped a com­pu­ta­tional model for visu­al­izing the spread of dis­ease by com­bining real-​​world pop­u­la­tion and human mobility data with elab­o­rate models on dis­ease trans­mis­sion. In par­tic­ular, Vespignani’s team is using this approach to track the Ebola out­break in West Africa and pre­dict its poten­tial spread globally.

Full article