UC Graduate Project Featured on Software Company Website

A data visualization project assigned to three graduate students during the winter term is now featured on the Tableau website, a Seattle-based software company that allows users to transform database and spreadsheet data into visual display.

The project, promoted in the company’s community gallery of product users called ‘

Viz of the Day

,’ is part of a new data visualization course and a

new certificate program

in business analytics in the Lindner College of Business.

Graduate students Dilip Kotlapati, Swetha Vemuri and Sanghavi Iyer used the software as a learning tool in the data visualization course to examine NBA data and graphically display their findings.

The group—all students in the master of science in information systems program—examined data to visualize a basketball game between the Boston Celtics and New Jersey Nets.

Students analyzed the type of shots taken in the game (layup, jump, hook, three-point, etc.) and visually displayed where these shots were taken on an image of a basketball court. Through an interactive component, the group also plotted a quarterly performance of each individual player and how their shots fared with timing, attempts, misses and baskets made.

“In virtually all of our graduate courses in business analytics, students are required to do a project with real data,” says Jeff Camm, professor and head of the Department of Operations, Business Analytics and Information Systems. “This project is a wonderful example of that.”