Current Activities
Overview: MIDAS supports the campus community to develop this research theme with a two-pronged approach: research incubation and training. To enable innovative research, MIDAS collaborates with the AI Lab and the Institute for Social Research to offer research connection meetings to connect experts for unstructured data (text, image, video, etc) and domain researchers who plan to address significant research questions using such data, showcase new datasets and plan for research projects and grants. For training, MIDAS organized a series of tutorials designed to introduce Natural Language Processing (NLP) to domain researchers. We are developing training for generative AI at this moment.
Who Will Benefit: Researchers who want to learn the fundamentals of research with unstructured data, researchers who have such data and want to connect with methodology experts, and methodology experts who want to seek domain collaborators to significant research questions.
Coordinators: Beth Uberseder (Research Manager, MIDAS)
Overview: MIDAS supports and collaborates with our faculty and campus units who develop new data sources and data infrastructure for social science research, and enable the wide adoption of such new resources. To name just a few examples: 1) The Research Data Ecosystem, a major effort of ICPSR with NSF funding to modernize the existing software platform to increase the ability of researchers to safely and securely access, connect, store, and manipulate data. MIDAS is a collaborator for the grant application and the project implementations. 2) MIDAS provided initial funding and data access for Libby Hemphill (faculty member in the School of Information and ICPSR) to develop the Social Media Archive. 3) MIDAS pilot funding for faculty effort to develop new data for social science (such as a large scale data on romantic relationships and digitizing the G.I. Bill record data).
Who will benefit: Researchers and units that develop new data sources and infrastructure.
Coordinators: Jing Liu (Executive Director, MIDAS) and Beth Uberseder (Research Manager, MIDAS)