A two-year project called Regional Economic Development has received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The project will apply advanced data analytics to promote regional economic development and design policies appropriate for a particular region’s characteristics.
The project will build a complex computational model that integrates data science and regional economic science. In addition to drawing on traditional socioeconomic information and methods, it will make use of data from unconventional sources such as social media, mouse clicks and data extracted from websites via web-scraping tools.
Leading the project are Timothy Slaper, director of economic analysis at the Kelley School of Business’ Indiana Business Research Center, and David Wild, associate professor of informatics and computing and director of data science academic programs in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.
“Economic development at the regional level is exceedingly complex, and it takes place in a continuously evolving environment,” Slaper said. “This project will bring together new tools for data capture and analysis to address concerns such as economic resiliency, broadening the beneficiaries of economic growth and encouraging innovation.”
“We are very excited to be part of this high-impact project that will benefit Indiana, the region and the nation,” Wild said. “We are bringing together top researchers in data infrastructures, nontraditional data sets and complex systems to create approaches focused on technological and scientific innovation. By partnering computational and domain experts, we believe we can advance the rapidly emerging field of regional economic development.”
More information about the project, its goals and the grant is available online.
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