News

Olivet University's institute of technology presents a new course for Fall 2013 on data mining, which makes possible the discovery of interesting and important patterns from large amounts of data. IT students develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of popular data mining techniques and to be able to identify promising applications of data mining in the context of church development, Gospel Preaching, and spiritual growth. Data mining, or intelligent analysis of information stored in data sets, has recently gained a substantial interest among practitioners in a variety of human-society fields and industry sectors.

Professor of the course, Dr. Jinhua Dong, comments on the need of providing the right tools within this area of study.

"It, however, receives relatively less attention in Christian community," said Dr. Dong.  "As the whole world gradually moves towards the 'network generation', it is imperative to have biblical scholars and leaders be equipped with the right tools to find and understand patterns of people’s behavior from a variety of data sources, which will help them make better decisions, improve strategies to reach out people, discover new approaches to spread God’s words to younger generations, design new programs to address needs faced by Christians around the world, and predict important events or trends in communities."

The course attempts to combine the introductory knowledge with the advanced topics on data mining into a single seminar. One of the goals is to find out how the data mining technology can be used to help preach the Gospel effectively.  It introduces the concepts, algorithms, techniques, and systems of data warehousing and data mining.

Dr. Jianhua Dong received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science.