School of Business to begin construction of new data center

Hood College’s School of Business will begin construction of the new Data Driven Frederick classroom in Rosenstock Hall this summer.

Data Driven Frederick will be a multipurpose analytics center devoted to evaluating community data, said David Gurzick, chair of the George B. Delaplaine Jr. School of Business and the initial director of the center.

Data Driven Frederick will be open to students to learn analytic skills, as well as associate faculty members and staff who are welcome to use the room for various projects to further the spread of access to data, Gurzick said.

“We’re looking to develop the skills in our students to be able to go out and drive data-driven decisions for companies they are working for,” Gurzick said.

Gurzick said that construction should be completed by fall 2022. The estimate is based on how long it took to build the Virginia Munson Hammell ’67 trading room currently located in Rosenstock Hall.

The Data Driven Frederick room will be across the hall from the trading room, mirroring the look of it, Gurzick said. There will be monitors stitched together on the walls to display dashboards of analytics.

It will be an interactive space where people can be virtual and in-person, seamlessly working together, Gurzick said. “It’s going to be a student place,” Gurzick said. “We hope and expect that people with interests in data are able to use the space.”

The School of Business already has students working on dashboards for the center and professors are working to create classes to incorporate the center into Hood’s academics, Gurzick said.

The name Data Driven Frederick originates from a group in Detroit with a similar mission called Data Driven Detroit, Gurzick said.

The members of Data Driven Detroit had basic maps of the city but did not know the state of the homes in certain areas, Gurzick said. They asked locals to help report the state of houses within specific areas of the city to create up-to-date maps and be able to devote resources to rebuild those areas.

The short-term goal of Data Driven Frederick is to find data sets that are relevant to the Frederick area and bring communal data sets together, Gurzick said. The long-term goal is to be a resource for companies that are looking for specific sets of data.

Once the center is operating, other organizations will be able to rely it for data to start and support their research projects, Gurzick said. In other words, Data Driven Frederick will serve as a data library.

“Initial focus is to be policy agnostic and data focused, which in other words we’re not taking on any hot bed issues…our focus is going to be on data,” Gurzick said.

For more information regarding Data Driven Frederick and future analytics classes at Hood, email Professor David Gurzick at gurzick@hood.edu.