Feature Stories

SAS Mini-Grant Funds "the Beauty of Math" at Spelman College

Tasha Inniss has loved mathematics since she was in the fourth grade and saw what she calls "the beauty of math" – the ability to use it to solve concrete, real-world problems.

Now as an applied mathematician, Inniss does just that in fields such as healthcare and education.

"I want my math to do something for the real world. If students could see how math can be applied to the real world, they’d see the beauty of math," says Inniss, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta.

She conveys her passion for what math can do by mentoring female math students, delivering motivational speeches to school kids and engaging in interdisciplinary research.

She also spreads the word by teaching students and colleagues about the power of data mining and text mining, which help answer diverse questions by analyzing huge amounts of data. And she won a SAS Course Development Mini-Grant in 2006 to help her share her vision.

About the mini-grant

Inniss wanted to reach undergraduate math students at Spelman by creating a special topics course on data mining and by enabling independent-study students to use data mining in original research.

But to do this, Inniss needed access to data mining software. So she applied for a mini-grant from the SAS Academic Program, which gave her a free license to use SAS® Enterprise Miner for six months to help her develop her course.

"It’s a fantastic software program. I would prefer it to any other software because it’s so powerful," she says.

She praises the course notes – including examples and data – that came with SAS Enterprise Miner, saying it made the software easy to teach and learn.

The difference the grant made

During the mini-grant period, Inniss tested the software, explored how to implement it in a course, and considered what topics and techniques she would need to cover.

She was also able to demonstrate the software to colleagues and let students try it. Such access to the software is useful for helping professors make a case to their institutions to get data mining software, she says.

Although still in the planning stage, Inniss’ data mining course will be one of the few such offerings for undergraduates in the nation and a first at Spelman.

"I want students to be able to apply data mining to data that they’re interested in and to expose them to a career option," Inniss says.

The mini-grant was a boon to Inniss’ own research as well, helping her to win a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for exploratory research on text mining. Because the mini-grant also gave her free use of SAS® Text Miner for six months, she was able to state in the NSF grant application that she had used text mining software.

What’s next for Inniss

Inniss will keep applying data mining and text mining in her interdisciplinary research, as she did in a recent study of transcripts of ophthalmologists’ descriptions of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). She and her colleagues found that text mining – compared to other methods of analysis – did a good job of quickly analyzing the transcripts and building a comprehensive list of descriptions of AMD. Such a list can help standardize the way doctors describe this eye disease and lead to better patient care.

"Text mining gives extra insight into data, minimizes researchers’ bias and reduces the time it takes to analyze data," she says.

Her NSF-funded research examines whether text mining is a useful method of analyzing transcripts of videotapes for educational research. She suspects that text mining is an effective tool, particularly for visualizing how concepts relate to one another. The findings of this study may help streamline qualitative analysis for educational researchers and ultimately to help improve the effectiveness of education.

Inniss will also continue to share her interest in data mining with students, partly because it teaches them not to compartmentalize their learning. It shows that math applies, for instance, to chemistry, business and healthcare – and vice versa.

"Students really need to see how the world comes together, and data mining can show them that," she says.

To learn more about the SAS Course Development Mini-Grant Program and how to apply for a mini-grant, please download this flier or e-mail us at minigrant@sas.com.