Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute – Data Science for Social Good

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Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute – Data Science for Social Good

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2015-Bloomberg-DS4GX

On Github arokem / 2015-Bloomberg-DS4GX

Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute

Ariel Rokem, University of Washington eScience Institute

Follow along at http://arokem.github.io/2015-Bloomberg-DS4GX/

Two major problems:

How do we enable data-driven approaches in institutions devoted to social good?

How can we provide training for data-scientists interested in social good?

Our solution

A ten-week internship program matching student DSSG fellows with project leads from organizations in the Seattle region devoted to social good, for intense joint work focused on providing a specific data-driven solution.

A bit of context

Our mission: "All across our campus, the process of discovery will increasingly rely on researchers’ ability to extract knowledge from vast amounts of data... In order to remain at the forefront, UW must be a leader in advancing these techniques and technologies, and in making [them] accessible to researchers in the broadest imaginable range of fields"

Incubator projects

Focused, intensive, collaborative projects

Data scientists + domain scientists

Results that wouldn't be possible otherwise

Urban @ UW

Inclusive data-driven innovation for the future of cities

Bridging organization:

Between the University and the City

Between researchers

Facilitating translational urban research

Educating scholars, practitioners and citizens

Data Science for Social Good

University of Chicago, since 2012

Georgia Tech, since 2014

Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute

Our recipe

4 projects (with project leads)

of 11 applications

17 DSSG Fellows

of 144 applications

6 High School students (ALVA program)

The eScience infrastructure

eScience Data Scientist Mentors Program managers Data science studio

Training in data science:

Group tutorials

Individual mentorship

Peer instruction and collaboration

The projects

Assessing Community Well-being through Open Data

Project Lead: Shelly Farnham, Third Place Technologies DSSG Fellows: Jordan Bates, Ryan Burns, Jenny Ho, Yue Zhou ALVA Students: Avery Glass, Jennifer Nino eScience Data Scientist Mentors: Bernease Herman, Bill Howe

Socrata crime incidence data

Survey data

Data from social networks (facebook, twitter, etc.)

Rerouting Solutions for King County Paratransit

Project Lead: Anat Caspi, Taskar Center for Accessible Technology DSSG Fellows:Rohan Aras, Frank Fineis, Kristen Garofali, Kivan Polimis DREU Fellow: Emily Andrulis, Cornell College eScience Data Scientist Mentors: Joseph Hellerstein, Valentina Staneva
Optimizing routing to reduce costs and develop tools to aid route planning

Open Sidewalks: route maps for low-mobility citizens

Project Leads: Nick Bolten Anat Caspi, Taskar Center for Accessible Technology DSSG Fellows: Amir Amini, Yun Hao, Vaishnavi Ravichandran, Andre Stephens ALVA Students : Nick Krasnoselsky, Doris Layman eScience Data Scientist Mentors: Anthony Arendt, Jake Vanderplas
Connecting open sidewalk data through computational geometry
Powered by data from SDOT/Socrata, Google API

Predictors of Permanent Housing for Homeless Families

Project Leads: Anjana Sundaram, Neil Roche, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation DSSG Fellows: Joan Wang, Jason Portenoy, Fabliha Ibnat, Chris Suberlak ALVA Students: Cameron Holt, Xilalit Sanchez eScience Data Scientist Mentors: Ariel Rokem, Bryna Hazelton
Family Trajectories through Programs
http://tinyurl.com/dssg-homeless

A few lessons we learned

It is possible to both:

Have impact on social good through data Provide data scientists with effective training

Trainee diversity poses a challenge in formal settings

But might be a strength in the context of project work!

Stakeholder involvement is important (no projects "thrown over the fence")

In-house expertise (data scientists, program managers) are an important asset

But (hypothesis) DSSG programs scale up or down

you can probably do this at home!

Questions?

http://arokem.org
arokem@gmail.com
@arokem
github.com/arokem
Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute Ariel Rokem, University of Washington eScience Institute Follow along at http://arokem.github.io/2015-Bloomberg-DS4GX/