Webinars, Hosted by Development Communications Childhood Obesity: Causes and Opportunities for Prevention The Skinny on Trans Fats Humanitarian Crises: Challenges for the 21st Century Bird Flu: Public Health and Pandemics Occupational Health in China: Opportunities for Global Companies

Academic Program “ Winter Session provides a break from the academic routine of the fall and spring semesters, and offers opportunities for creativity and innovation in learning and teaching.”

Epidemiology 288, Data Mining and Prediction Professors Fran Cook, Nancy Cook This course will present an introduction to the methods of data mining and predictive modeling, with applications to both genetic and clinical data. Basic concepts and philosophy of supervised and unsupervised data mining as well as appropriate applications will be discussed. Topics covered will include multiple comparisons adjustment, cluster analysis, self-organizing maps, principal component analysis, and predictive model building through logistic regression, classification and regression trees (CART), multivariate adaptive splines (MARS), neural networks, random forests, and bagging and boosting.

Webex VOIP conferences  Professor’s laptop served as host machine and was shared to Webex conference  Teaching assistant joined conference and fielded “chat” questions from distance students and assisted with any troubleshooting  Room was staffed throughout with audio-visual technician  Webex sessions were recorded  2-4 hours daily for 2 weeks

January students 2 distance (California, Illinois)

Evaluation process Changes for 2008:  Added Revo Laboratory microphones  Explored virtual computing laboratories

January students 5+ distance 20+ distance on snow day

“I did the course via online connection. This is a very good alternative especially for students who are away from Boston/international. I had a wonderful experience. Background in logistic/linear regression and prediction modeling helps, but definitely not necessary. Would recommend highly.”