Category

Data

Sep 26 2017
0

Real estate dataset available to researchers

By | Data, Data sets, Educational, General Interest, Happenings, News

The University of Michigan Library system and the Data Acquisition for Data Sciences program (DADS) of the U-M Data Science Initiative (DSI) have recently joined forces to license a major data resource capturing parcel-level information about the property market in the United States.  

The data were licensed from the Corelogic corporation, who have assimilated deed, tax and foreclosure information on nearly all properties in the entire US. Coverage dates vary by county, some county records go back fifty years. Coverage is more comprehensive from the 1990s to the present.

These data will support a variety of research efforts into regional economies, economic disparities, trends in land-use, housing market dynamics, and urban ecology, among many other areas.

The data are available on the Turbo Research Storage system for users of the U-M High Performance Computing infrastructure, and via the University of Michigan Library.

To access the data, researchers must first sign a MOU; contact Senior Associate Librarian Catherine Morse cmorse@umich.edu for more information, or visit https://www.lib.umich.edu/database/corelogic-parcel-level-real-estate-data.

Sep 08 2017
0

Mini-course: Introduction to Python — Sept. 11-14

By | Data, Educational, Events, General Interest, News

Asst. Prof. Emanuel Gull, Physics, is offering a mini-course introducing the Python programming language in a four-lecture series. Beginners without any programming experience as well as programmers who usually use other languages (C, C++, Fortran, Java, …) are encouraged to come; no prior knowledge of programming languages is required!

For the first two lectures we will mostly follow the book Learning Python. This book is available at our library. An earlier edition (with small differences, equivalent for all practical purposes) is available as an e-book. The second week will introduce some useful python libraries: numpy, scipy, matplotlib.

At the end of the first two weeks you will know enough about Python to use it for your grad class homework and your research.

Special meeting place: we will meet in 340 West Hall on Monday September 11 at 5 PM.

Please bring a laptop computer along to follow the exercises!

Syllabus (Dates & Location for Fall 2017)

  1. Monday September 11 5:00 – 6:30 PM: Welcome & Getting Started (hello.py). Location: 340 West Hall
  2. Tuesday September 12 5:00 – 6:30 PM: Numbers, Strings, Lists, Dictionaries, Tuples, Functions, Modules, Control flow. Location: 335 West Hall
  3. Wednesday September 13 5:00 – 6:30 PM: Useful Python libraries (part I): numpy, scipy, matplotlib. Location: 335 West Hall
  4. Thursday September 14 5:00 – 6:30 PM: Useful Python libraries (part 2): 3d plotting in matplotlib and exercises. Location: 335 West Hall

For more information: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/gull-lab/teaching/physics-514-fall-2017/introduction-to-python/

 

Aug 15 2017
0

Flux HPC Blog: Querying data with SparkSQL

By | Data, General Interest, HPC, News

SparkSQL is a way for people to use SQL-like language to query their data with ease while taking advantage of the speed of Spark, a fast, general engine for data processing that runs over Hadoop. I wanted to test this out on a dataset I found from Walmart with their stores’ weekly sales numbers. I put the csv into our cluster’s HDFS (in /var/walmart) making it accessible to all Flux Hadoop users.

Jul 27 2017
0

U-M, SJTU research teams share $1 million for data science projects

By | Data, General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

Five research teams from the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China are sharing $1 million to study data science and its impact on air quality, galaxy clusters, lightweight metals, financial trading and renewable energy.

Since 2009, the two universities have collaborated on a number of research projects that address challenges and opportunities in energy, biomedicine, nanotechnology and data science.

In the latest round of annual grants, the winning projects focus on data science and how it can be applied to chemistry and physics of the universe, as well as finance and economics.

For more, read the University Record article.

For descriptions of the research projects, see the MIDAS/SJTU partnership page.