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  Big Data on Campus to Decline Dropout Rates?

  What if colleges could predict whether students would drop out of college before they had a chance to? How helpful would this information be in reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation rates?

  Well, a new system may be able to help do just that.

  "We have identified factors that can be predictors of student success, which gives colleges the ability to flag at-risk students," says Eric Reich of Higher One's Campus Labs platform. "Now, thanks to Higher One's Campus Labs platform, colleges are able to use sophisticated data analysis techniques to understand more about students."

  Clues to how students are doing include how often they participate in campus activities (like sporting events or student organizations), how often they use campus services (such as checking in at the financial aid office, career center or computer labs) and how engaged they are with their own course work (providing course feedback or visiting professors during office hours).

  All of these actions create data that institutions can capture, and all of these actions have been shown to increase the likelihood of a student to graduate. It makes sense, but only in recent years have schools embraced the technology that can gather and analyze these data so the college can really identify at-risk students and "tweak" their programs to help.

  "Using Campus Labs, an advisor can actually detect patterns of students who are not successful and intervene to give them the guidance at the critical time -- before it's too late," says Reich.

  Just look at Northern Arizona University, which recently partnered with Higher One to help the University collect data, collaborate across divisions, embrace student assessment and ultimately guide decisions by administrators.

  "Freshman outreach has been very successful for us," says Erin Grisham, executive director of educational support service at Northern Arizona. "Students we meet with retain at higher rates than those we don't meet with."

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  Engineers as Entrepreneurs

  Engineers have given the world many of the great innovations we live by today -- Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, just to mention some household names.

  But did you know what else each of those great engineers did to realize success? They founded great enterprises to support the potential of their engineering innovations.

  The great American tradition of engineers-as-entrepreneurs continues today. Young, ambitious visionaries are still coming forward, stoked with ideas and the savvy to bring these ideas to life by bringing them to market. Sometimes they've conceived a previously undreamt-of way to improve some aspect of life we all face every day. Sometimes they've dreamed of making life just a little bit easier for people in far-flung or disadvantaged parts of the world. Sometimes they're figuring out how to make modern life greener and cleaner for everyone.

  Ecovative Design LLC, Green Island, N.Y., is a great example of this tradition in operation today. Ecovative was founded by Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre in 2006. They met at an Inventor's Studio course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy N.Y., where they created and eventually patented a mushroom-based insulation then called Greensulate, using agricultural waste and the growth properties of mushrooms to grow packing material that functions like traditional Styrofoam but biodegrades harmlessly.

  Another leading engineer-entrepreneur today is Amos Winter, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winter is the creator of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, an ingenious improvement on traditional wheelchair design that takes advantage of levers and easily sourced bike parts to overcome the problems that have prevented traditional wheelchairs from succeeding in the unpaved, hilly and muddy regions of the developing world.

  Besides obvious brilliance, ambition and drive, what unites young visionaries like Bayer, McIntyre and Winter?

  One thing they all have in common is that they received an early boost by bringing their visions and plans to the Innovation Showcase, or iShow. Sponsored by ASME, the American Society for Mechanical Engineers, the iShow is a competition for early-career engineer-entrepreneurs from all over the world. Bayer, McIntyre and Winter are not just brilliant -- they're iShow Winners.

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  New Hope for the Medically Disabled

  Among the marvels of modern medicine are neural prosthetics, tiny bioengineered devices that surgeons implant in brain tissue to compensate for a variety of disabilities to the human nervous system. Physicians already have had much success with cochlear implants for the hearing impaired, with future research programs aimed at assisting epileptics, victims of Alzheimer's disease, and even individuals who have sustained spinal cord injury and loss of limbs.

  Neuroscientists see a vast horizon for these micro implants, which are able to read electrical and chemical signals from the nervous system to stimulate sensory function lost through disease or injury. What the amazing devices do is avoid the damaged neural lines of communication in the body to restore function. In the case of the cochlear prosthetics, for example, sounds gathered from a tiny microphone are converted to electrical signals and used to stimulate the auditory nerve of deaf patients.

  Neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, materials scientists, and mechanical engineers are all collaborating on the research and development of neural prosthetics, which each year receive $6.5 million in funding at the National Institutes of Health.

  Engineers play a significant role in the interdisciplinary research and development of neural prosthetics. Engineers will be called on to make innovative use of materials to design and fabricate devices that allow sustained electronic functioning in the environment of the human body, without causing tissue infection or other serious conditions. Research efforts have focused on technologies that enable the micro devices to be safely implanted in human tissue for long periods. Sarah Felix, a research engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), is making gains with thin-film flexible polymer materials that allow devices to conform to the live tissue in which they are implanted.

  Lawrence Livermore is currently developing neural implants that are able to restore auditory, motor and bladder function, aid speech, and control depression and epilepsy. Future programs at the lab include experimentation with deep brain and spinal cord simulation, which will enable physicians to advance neural prosthetics to the next level of human health and rehabilitation.

  Promising clinical studies are underway at some of the most prestigious medical research centers in the U.S. as the scientific community continues to advance neural prosthetics to help disabled persons achieve quality of life. Indeed, neural prosthetics will be an intriguing pathway of multidisciplinary scientific and engineering development for years to come.