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BMW continues support of Clemson faculty research and programs in 2017

June 21, 2017

In 2017, BMW has continued its support of innovative research and engaging programs at Clemson. Highlighted contributions include:

Men of Color National Summit – BMW was a corporate sponsor for Clemson’s first annual Men of Color National Summit in Greenville, SC April 27-28, 2017. The goal of the Men of Color National Summit is to open up educational and career opportunities for young men of color, most of whom will be first-generation college students who often face an unusually challenging path to higher education. The first annual Summit brought together approximately 2,000 high school and college students, business professionals, educators, government officials and community leaders from around the country, emphasizing the importance of education, best practices, and choices to increase high school and college graduation rates. The Summit also serves as a kick-off to Clemson’s new Tiger Alliance program, a partnership with Greenville County Schools, Anderson District 5, and schools from South Carolina’s I-95 corridor. Through the program, Clemson University will mentor a special cohort of 400 African-American and Hispanic male 9th-11th graders through a revolving, multi-year initiative.

German Language Program – BMW has supported the German Language Program at Clemson since 2002, allowing the program to expand its activities and offerings for students. BMW’s contributions to the program have helped Clemson host an annual conference for German in the professions for the past five years; supported professional development opportunities for students in the German program, including networking events with BMW representatives and other international employers; and provided BMW Senior Lecturer of German Lee Ferrell with support for his outreach efforts to German programs at area high schools.

Call Me MISTER Program – The Call Me MISTER program seeks to increase the pool of available teachers from a broader more diverse background particularly among South Carolina’s lowest performing elementary schools. BMW has supported Call Me MISTER since 2002, playing an important role in helping the program expand to 13 institutions across six states. Since 2004, 100 percent of the more than 150 students that have completed the Call Me MISTER have remained in the education profession in South Carolina.

South Carolina’s Coalition for Math & Science – South Carolina’s Coalition of Math and Science (SCCMS), and related initiatives the Upstate STEM Collaborative and the Lowcountry STEM Collaborative, is an alliance of partnering organizations and initiatives, each reaching the education and business communities in different ways, with a central focus on promoting economic development through improving K-12 education. BMW has supported SCCMS since 2004, helping the organization bring together partners from industry, education, government, and the community to inspire the next generation of STEM leaders.

“Text Analysis and Natural Language Understanding” Project Support – BMW has supported this project, led by Dr. Alex Herzog, Professor of Practice in the School of Computing, which focuses on intelligent mining of customer data for feedback analysis. Herzog and his team will compare different techniques to determine semantic information that will provide BMW with cutting-edge algorithms; explore visualization techniques that will enable researchers and business analysts to draw insights from semantic word embeddings; investigate how existing methods can be adapted to solve problems; and apply these methods to extract knowledge from streaming data, such as Twitter feeds.