The eScience Institute is pleased to announce a new summer program: Data Science for Social Good (DSSG). The program is modeled after similar programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, but with elements taken from the eScience Institute’s Data Science Incubator. Similar to the Incubator program, the goal of the DSSG is to enable new insight by bringing together data scientists and domain scientists to work on focused, collaborative projects. For the summer program, these projects will be designed to impact public policy for social benefit.

This year, the theme for DSSG projects will be Urban Science. Projects will involve analysis, visualization and/or software engineering of data from urban environments such as crime data, government and NGO financials, housing data, cell phone GPS data, etc. Topic areas may include public health, sustainable urban planning, environmental protection, disaster response, crime prevention, education, transportation, governance, commerce, and social justice.

DSSG teams will be composed of 4 DSSG students which are working full time on this, a project lead, which guides the research aspects of the project, and provided the data and the questions, and eScience data scientist, which helps guide the teams towards the appropriate technical solutions. These teams are modeled after the eScience Institute’s data science incubator projects.