Project Title: Purchase Stata License for Redhawk Computing Cluster

Project Lead's Name: Charles Moul

Project Lead's Email: moulcc@MiamiOH.edu

Project Lead's Phone: 513-529-2867

Project Lead's Division: FSB

Primary Department: Economics 

List Departments Benefiting or Affected by this proposal: Economics primarily, but students of any department on campus have access to the software on the cluster.

Estimated Number of Under-Graduate students affected per year (should be number who will actually use solution, not just who is it available to): 2

Estimated Number of Graduate students affected per year (should be number who will actually use solution, not just who is it available to): 3

Describe the problem you are attempting to solve and your approach for solving that problem: The economics honors students and Masters students are required to complete a thesis for graduation. Increasingly over the past few years students have chosen to work on empirical theses that use big data sets and that require large amounts of computing power. This requires students to conduct their empirical work on the Redhawk Computing Cluster. The State licenses for educational use in the classroom do not allow students to use large datasets. The economics department has purchased 5 Stata 16 licenses for faculty research. In the past, graduate and honors students have been able to get their work done in the times that faculty were not using our 5 licenses.

Unfortunately, the licenses we have purchased are now not enough to handle the demand. Economics has become increasingly empirical and the use of large data sets has grown in our faculty's research. (Faculty in Finance and Accounting have also turned to using the Stata licenses on the cluster for their own research.) At the same time, the demand from Masters and Honors theses has grown. To be able to continue to provide the high quality education to our best students interested in research, we need to purchase additional licenses to handle the demand on the cluster.

How would you describe the innovation and/or the significance of your project: The significance of our proposal is that we provide a very in depth, high quality, and time-intensive education to best students on how to conduct their own economic research. Without the additional licenses, we will be hindered in our ability to allow students the research opportunities in empirical work with large datasets.

How will you assess the success of the project: The success of the project will evaluated by counting the number of Masters and Honors students that use the new State licenses while conducting research for their honors or Masters theses. If we see a continued increase in research opportunities for these students using the cluster, then the project will have been successful.

Total Amount Requested: $2,595

Budget Details: $2,595

Please address how, if at all, this project aligns with University, Divisional, Departmental or Center strategic goals: The project aligns with the goals of the Analytics and Data Science Program under Boldly Creative. While this proposal is not affiliated with Boldly Creative, the importance of increasing student ability with data science is the entire purpose of our methods courses and the software purchase. It also aligns with the importance of research opportunities for our students.