https://phys.org/news/2018-07-statistics-science-students-collaborate-real-world.html

Their solution, in part, leveraged the increasing awareness among Atlanta-area businesses of the importance of data. The Analytics and Data Science Institute created nine sponsored research laboratories, each focused on data problems facing a business or public service or nonprofit, and each with one to four Ph.D. students led by a faculty member. "They're like miniature think tanks exploring real-world problems," says Ray. "And in doing so, students get to understand the problem from the computer science and the statistical perspective." A more traditionally minded statistics student might be encouraged by a colleague to explore neural networks, while a more traditionally minded computer science student might be encouraged to see why they have to use representative sampling over convenience sampling.

One recent project involved working with Cobb County Fire Department, a suburb of Atlanta, which was not meeting the national metrics for fire standards. "We took all their data for fire and ambulance events—the time of the first phone call to the time the ambulance left the firehouse to the time it took it to get to an event. We looked at the routes and traffic patterns, and then optimized response times using graft theory and Google Maps." Routes were changed, fire zones reallocated, and response times were cut. "The Cobb County fire chief is very data savvy," says Ray, "so he's implementing incremental changes and then seeing how the data updates."