Active Research

Mobile Research 
GIS & Vizualization Research 
Statistical Consulting Research 
High Performance Computing Research 

Mobile Research

HeartCare:

Funded by NIH, researchers from UCLA Health, Radiation-Diagnostic, and Oncology, led by PI Corey Wells Arnold, PhD, recently teamed with OARC’s Mobilize Labs to create a smartphone app to assist heart failure patients to monitor their progress and receive adherence notifications and short surveys in a pilot study. This home monitoring regimen has the potential to reduce costs and improve quality of life by preventing hospital readmission.

PRISMS:

Funded by the NIH, UCLA’s Medical Imaging Informatics (MII) research group seeks to develop sensor-based mobile health (mHealth) technology to predict and possibly prevent a potential asthma attack for pediatric patients using predictive analytics. The research group, led by PI Alex Bui, PhD, collaborated with OARC’s Mobilize Lab team to develop a mobile platform to collect sensor data powered by informatics from pediatric patients using a wearable device. The development of the integrated mHealth BREATHE platform is a collaboration between UCLA Engineering, UCLA Mobilize Lab, USC, and 8 other universities.

eQIS:

This 4-year NSF-funded study is a collaboration among multidisciplinary team of researchers at UCLA GSEIS, University of Notre Dame, and The RAND Corporation. The eQIS project, led by PI Jose Felipe Martinez, PhD, intends to provide a new generation of teacher e-portfolios leveraging modern tablet and web technologies for science instruction. OARC’s Mobilize Labs co-designed, developed, managed, maintained, and supported the e-Qis app, web-dashboard, and mobile data repository.  

CoachToFit:

A mobile app built in partnership with Veteran Affairs (VA) Desert Pacific MIRECC, led by PI Amy Cohen, PhD, to combat obesity in Veterans with serious mental illness. OARC’s Mobilize Labs provided expertise in mobile development to capture data from wearable/sensor devices and mobile phones to provide data visualization and feedback via Ohmage Data Repository

BruinXperience:

Funded by the Lumina Foundation Racial Justice and Equity grant, UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion partnered with OARC’s Mobilize Labs to develop a mobile app for students to communicate their experiences (good, bad, or indifferent) at UCLA. The Mobilize Labs team manages and maintains the app as well as the mobile data collected in a mobile data repository. The data collected is then used to measure the campus climate in how student feelings change in conjunction with local, national, and global events.

RunFueled:

Researchers from UCLA and Stanford  University collaborated to determine if better nutrition can protect them from getting hurt if and when athletic runners become injured. OARC Mobilize Labs developed an application to provide individualized convenient nutrition education, recipe suggestions, and tips for supplementing food. The ongoing study is monitoring if athletes will benefit from nutrition education intervention.

GIS & Visualization Research

UCLA Tall Buildings Resilience Project:

Using open-source technologies, the research team, led by RTG researchers Yoh Kawano, MA, and Albert Kochaphum, MA, developed a data visualization web-platform that portrays structural dimensions of Los Angeles’ built environment and its resilience to varying ground motion simulations. This project was a collaboration with UCLA Samueli Civil and Environmental Engineering (PI and other departments involved)

Hate Crime Map:

UCLA American Indian Studies Center developed a web-based interactive Hate Crime Map to document and analyze hate crimes in the United States. RTG researcher Albert Kochaphum, MA, provided supervisorial support in assisting the student programmer in developing the website and advising on data visualization aspects of the project.

Million Dollar Hoods: 

The research team is an interdisciplinary group of UCLA scholars, led by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, PhD, professor of History and African-American Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA, to map how much L.A. Sheriff’s and Los Angeles Police Department spent on incarceration and where arrests were. OARC’s GIS and Visualization technologist scraped, cleaned, coded, and mapped the data sets as well as built the project website. OARC staff continues to provide technical consultation, project management, and leadership on their digital directives in producing reports from the historical crime data to impact legislation. 

VSim:

An NEH-funded project to develop software to facilitate use of academically generated three-dimensional models in both formal and informal educational settings. Project website.

World’s Columbian Exposition Reconstruction:

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a landmark event in American history. Held in Chicago, this seminal world’s fair is widely studied across a range of disciplines including architecture, urban planning, women’s studies, religious studies, and art history. The reconstruction model is both a work-in-progress and actively used as a testbed for educational applications for interactive computer technology. Project website.

MetaMap:

Mapping disability infrastructure at UCLA for accessible bathrooms, elevators, and routes. OARC’s Disabilities and Computing Program and UCLA Facilities in the data coalition, surveying, and data management is supporting the GIS implementation of the project. The overall goal is to provide a safe place and welcoming place for all students at UCLA irrespective of their ability and to have an inclusive campus map where students can find the best ways to get to class even when elevators are broken. 

California Asian American Super Tuesday Voting Records:

The Asian American Studies Center is authoring a white paper on Asian American voter turnout in the California 2020 primary and comparing that with the 2016 primary. The goal of the project is to look at how disenfranchisement occurs in voting amongst the Asian American community as well as identify the areas in California for the greatest growth potential for the Asian American electorate. The report will be released in May as a part of Asian American history month. OARC is supporting the project by assisting the creation of the maps for these reports and other geospatial consulting on the data. 

Statistical Consulting Research

Generation/Transpop/Colombia Studies:

Funded by a federal grant from the NICHD, OARC Statistical Consulting collaborated with researchers at the UCLA Williams Institute and other researchers around the world on three large studies of LGBT populations. These studies explore relationships among identity, stress, health outcomes and health care in sexual minorities. For these projects, Andy Lin, PhD, and Shahrzad Divsalar, MS, of OARC’s Statistical Consulting Group provided data management and cleaning, statistical consultation, data analysis, and report generation. 

Kang Ting Lab Studies:

Researchers from UCLA Health and UCLA School of Dentistry, led by Co-PI Chia Soo, MD, and Co-PI Kang Ting, DMD, MMedSc, tested an experimental bone-building protein drug that could treat osteoporosis, and potentially help those with bone damage or loss, such as astronauts who lose bone density in space. UCLA researchers collaborated with NASA and the Center for the Advancement in Science to test rodents injected with the drug at the International Space Station. Andy Lin, PhD, of OARC’s Statistical Consulting, contributed to the project with data analysis, statistical consulting, and manuscript preparation. Research on NELL-1 is supported by past or current grants from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and multiple UCLA research.

mStudy of HIV: 

Funded and supported by the National Institutes of Health, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and several UCLA departments and centers, the team of clinical researchers, epidemiologists, and scientists collaborate to understand how drug use affects the immune system of HIV-positive and HIV-negative male-identified men who have sex with men, primarily Latino and African-American/Black men. The study, led by Pamina Gorbach, MHS, DrPH, is conducted at The Los Angeles LGBT Center and UCLA Vine Street Clinic. As part of the research, OARC’s Statistical Consulting researchers Johnny Lin, PhD, and Shahrzad Divsalar, MS, performed data cleaning, data analysis, generating data reports, and missing data simulation.

Restoration of Cognitive Function Studies: 

Researchers at the Laboratory of Neuromodulation and Neuroimaging, led by the director Nanthia Suthana, PhD, focuses on invasive and non-invasive methodologies to restore cognitive functions, such as deep brain stimulation with intracranial recordings and other non-invasive methods using TMS, EEG and high-resolution functional MRI. OARC’s Statistical Consulting researcher Andy Lin, PhD, contributed to multiple studies, led by PI Suthana, in providing data analysis, statistical consultation, and co-authored a review article suggesting best practices for deep brain stimulation and the statistical analysis of such data. These research studies were in collaboration with Department of Neurosurgery at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and supported by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the A. P. Giannini Foundation.

Child Labor from Social Welfare Study:

Co-funded by Children and Violence Evaluation Challenge Fund and the Child Protection Working Group, researchers led by CoPI Leyla Karimli, PhD, evaluated effect of the graduation program on child protection outcomes among children in ultra-poor communities in Burkina Faso. OARC’s Statistical Consulting provided data analysis, statistical consultation and manuscript preparation expected published to be published on World Development. 

Mental Health Study of AIDS-Orphaned Children:

Funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) and administered in the South Western region of Uganda, researchers, led by Co-PI Leyla Karimli, PhD, from UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Washington University, UCSF School of Medicine, Columbia University, and OARC’s Statistical Consulting aimed to understand whether child poverty, child work, and household wealth intervention affects mental health AIDS-orphaned children in African countries. OARC’s Christine Wells, PhD, provided data analysis of the social and economic issues clustered within villages and longitudinal. In addition, she offered statistical consultation and manuscript preparation for this study

High Performance Computing Research

Science Gateway Project:

Originally a part of Particlein-Cell (PIC) and Kinetic Simulation Software Center (PICKSC), funded by NSF, with researchers from UCLA Departments of Physics and Astronomy and UCLA Electrical Engineering, let by PI Warren B. Mori, PhD. PICKSC aimed to support and develop software for accelerating the rate of scientific discovery and to be a repository of knowledge and history of PIC for its international community. RTG researcher, Qiyang Hu, PhD, worked with PICKSC researchers to build and deploy a science gateway system using PHP and other tools to handle data input, authorization/authentication, job management and post-processing results from advanced computational clusters via a web browser.

Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of Turbulence Project:

Funded by the Office of Naval Research, UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and OARC developed and extended the code base of a fluid flow solver in complex geometry. In collaboration with John Kim, PhD., RTG researcher Shao-Ching Huang, PhD, developed a new MPI-based direct numerical simulation code for turbulent flows on superhydrophobic surfaces.

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) Project: 

AMR is an advanced numerical simulation technique, identified by DOE to be one of the exascale computing strategies. Internally funded and derived from the DNS of Turbulence Project and discussions with Warren Mori, PhD and other faculty, RTG researcher ShaoChing Huang, PhD, developed an immersed boundary method with mesh refinement capability to address underlying structured mesh errors caused by nature.

CalSIM Project: 

Funded by UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM), led by PI Gerald Kominski, PhD, is a micro-simulation model that has been used since 2012 to estimate the impact of various elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). RTG researchers were instrumental in transferring CalSIM from SAS to Python and provided ongoing support in computational data using the Hoffman2 Cluster and running CalSIM using parallel computing techniques.