The Thunder Bolt

Concordia senior Mirae has presented her paper at the International Conference for Big Data Education (ICBDE) - the only accepted paper from a High School out of approximately 70 presenters. 

Aimed at university researchers, the conference is sponsored by the University of Suffolk, with a committee of researchers from around the world, and featured keynote speakers Prof. Ljiljana Trajkovic from Simon Fraser University (Canada), and Assoc Prof Ryan Baker, Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania (USA).  

Mirae’s paper analyzed headlines in the Irish Times from 1996-2020 based on keywords. 

“I found that during elections, their usage of political keywords increased so much more,” adding that she chose the Irish Times due to its deep historical background and reputation for objective reporting.

Based on research from Big Data class when she was in G11 last year, Mirae's paper will be published in the ICBDE 2022 conference proceedings by ACM, which will be included in the ACM Digital Library, one of the largest educational and scientific computing societies, and indexed by CPCI, Ei Compendex, Scopus, which along with ACM are the main citation databases of peer-reviewed literature. 

Finding Her Future

Concordia’s Big Data Analysis course has helped Mirae find her chosen field of study - and potentially her career. 

“Concordia has given me an opportunity to actually further my learning, because I had not even thought of writing a paper and getting it published,” said Mirae. “I don’t think I would have had the opportunity if I wasn’t at Concordia, because very few other high schools teach Big Data anywhere in the world.”

“For me, this was a very meaningful experience, because it changed my perspective and my future path,” said Mirae. “Until I actually started this project, I wasn’t really interested in statistics or big data, and didn’t know what I wanted to study. Since doing this project, I’ve actually chosen Statistics and Big Data as my major.” 

“I think it’s a very interesting course, because students are creating something but it’s totally student-led. Instead of just following the teacher, students actually research topics of their own interest, and I think it’s really cool. I’m hoping that I will be a future big data specialist and work in large companies. This course really influenced me to pursue big data as a career.“

Concordia will host its own Concordia International Research Conference Hanoi (CIRCH) on April 2, 2022.