But the most influential new product may be the least flashy: a $100 million database built to chart the academic paths of public school students from kindergarten through high school.
"We see students coming in as freshmen saying they want to be statisticians," said Robert Gould, who is on the statistics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That was unheard-of before the AP test."
In a still-soft jobs market, rising demand for statisticians also has spurred interest in the field. There were 28,305 postings for jobs in statistics, analytics and, in the trendy phrase, "big data" at the jobs website icrunchdata last month, up from 16,500 three years earlier, according to Todd Nevins, a site co-founder.
"The companies that figure out how to generate intelligence from that data will know more about us than we know ourselves, and will be able to craft techniques that push us toward where they want us to go, rather than where we would go by ourselves if left to our own devices. "
"They start by tracking how many times a specific phrase turns up, using a website that tracks memes daily-sort of an early early warning system. Their algorithm then takes that data and analyzes the connections among social and information networks and the influence members have over one another. Their approach works, Colbaugh says, because it's a blend of social science (the power people have to influence others) and computer science (the power of Big Data)."
"We will soon begin to move in a sea of data, our movements tracked and our environments measured and adjusted to our preferences, without need for direct intervention."
Using advanced sensing and artificial intelligence technologies, we are investigating new ways to assess project-based activities, examining students' speech, gestures, sketches, and artifacts in order to better characterize their learning over extended periods of time.
Particularly aimed at assessing important skills that are currently hard to assess: creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. And this is even more challenging in large scale learning environments. Using sensing and data mining technologies could make it possible to capture and analyze massive amounts of process data of classroom activities.
https://tltl.stanford.edu/project/multimodal-learning-analytics
