INSITE: Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics is a big data analytics research center within the Department of Management Information Systems and Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. 

The MIS Department has been a top-five ranked program for over 24 consecutive years. It has successfully generated over $80 million in research grants and is the home to world renowned research faculty members.

The Center is co-directed by Sudha Ram and Paulo Goes, and was created to address the ever-growing volume, velocity, and variety of big data being generated by numerous sources including sensors, mobile applications, social media, and web-based platforms.

Innovation, Leadership and Research 

INSITE is a innovative center that focuses on predictive analytics through the use of data generated from social media, internal transactional, sensor and other emerging big data to provide analytics across multiple big data platforms. It provides visualization and real time analysis of interaction patterns gleaned from big data.

INSITE is a leader is developing scalable techniques for analyzing big data arising from a variety of sources including social media, sensors, mobile applications, and web-based platforms. INSITE's expertise is specifically in scalable network analysis, visualization, large-scale graph mining, and predictive modeling.

To analyze the diversity and large volumes of data in an impactful and timely manner, new analysis paradigms will be needed that efficiently combine solid quantitative and analytic techniques with business industry knowledge and practices. INSITE’s value proposition is to develop innovative analytical techniques to unleash the hidden wealth in big data and harness the power of social media, sensors-based data, and data generated from the Internet of Things to lead to actionable insights for organizations. INSITE’s main objective is to provide real-time in-depth large scale network analysis across the various types of data.

INSITE helps corporations effectively and efficiently transition from report-driven decisions (where business intelligence is used only to passively present historical data so that a business executive can make decisions) to performance-driven decisions where analytics are used to automatically and instantly make decisions that positively impact corporate performance.

INSITE is developing techniques, algorithms, and new technologies to extract actionable insights from big data including structured and unstructured sources such as blogs, tweets, wikis, sensors, mobile apps, and other sources.

INSITE’s research focuses on:

• Identifying and anticipating interesting and emerging phenomena related to Big Data
• Continuously collecting and creating datasets from multiple sources related to these phenomena
• Developing techniques to mine through these datasets

INSITE also:

• Provides interesting, accurate, and actionable insights
• Provides live or real-time business intelligence

The ultimate goal at INSITE is to capture the pulse of humanity in real time by analyzing various sources of big data through the different interaction networks. This will uncover patterns to create actionable insights for companies, ultimately resulting in intelligent business decisions.

Our History

Professor Sudha Ram has been working on research on a diverse array of topics related to solving problems of data management for over 30 years. As the director of the Advanced Database Research Group (ADRG), which was part of the Department of Management of Information Systems at Eller College, she successfully led a team of researchers investigating applications of data management in business, the sciences, government and academia.

Research at ADRG spanned different aspects of enterprise data management, business intelligence, large-scale networks, social media, web analytics, and data mining and has led to over 200 refereed publications. The various methods applied to problems included machine learning, network theory, statistical approaches, ontologies, and conceptual modeling. A variety of data management tools were also developed by group members.

Members of the group came from the MIS doctoral, master's, and undergraduate programs. Graduates have gone on to successful careers in both academia and industry. Universities our graduates have been placed at include University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Texas at Austin and Indiana University. Some of the companies our students have gone on to work for include Google, Qualcomm, PayPal, Amazon, PWC and Deloitte.

Group members have collaborated on a number of interdisciplinary projects with researchers in other departments and schools at the University such as BIO5, IE, Atmospheric Science and Physics, Hydrology and Water Resources, Optical Sciences, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Renewable Natural Resources, and, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Agriculture.

In 2012 ADRG transitioned to a University research center focused on business intelligence and big data analytics: INSITE.