Data Science for Social Good Fellowship Update We wanted to share an update with you from the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship team. Based on the funding situation and other projects that we’re launching and continuing, we have decided not to run a DSSG summer fellowship this summer. I know this will come as [...]
Preventive Care for the City's Circulatory System Around the world, cities are showing signs of old age. For urban areas, one of the first signs of advancing years comes in its circulatory system -- the water infrastructure -- as pipes laid underground over a century ago start to break down. Beyond the direct cost of [...]
Police Project Update: Expanding and Implementing the Early Intervention System In recent years, the issue of police violence and misconduct has repeatedly made headlines and inspired protests across the United States. With each incident, the trust between police departments and the communities they protect takes damage, and the work of police officers in the field [...]
Scoping Data (for Social Good) Projects Resources in this post: Blank Project Scoping Worksheet (Previous Version) and a filled-out Project Scoping Worksheet. Over the past several years, the University of Chicago Center for Data Science and Public Policy and the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship have worked on over 100 data science projects and one (unsurprising) [...]
The Real World: DSSG This is the true story of 42 strangers picked to live in a dorm, work together, and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Welcome to The Real World: DSSG. Okay, so we don’t tape their lives (except for when [...]
Every year, some 1 million people die because they do not have access to hygienic sanitation. Among other problems, poor sanitation causes diarrhoea, which is the second largest cause of death worldwide for children under 5 years and the seventh largest cause of death overall. Poor sanitation goes beyond dirty toilets; it’s characterized by an [...]
Over 1.2 million or 7.1% high school students drop out every year. Dropping out of high school is costly for both the students and society: 30% of dropouts are unemployed, their average annual income is $20,241 (34% lower than high school graduates), and a dropout costs taxpayers an average of $292,000 over a lifetime due [...]
It's usual for those of us here at Data Science for Social Good to want to see our projects thrown into the spotlight. More publicity means a wider audience, which means a greater impact (or so the theory goes). Yet for my own “Team Charlotte” and our close partners at “Team Nashville”, the recent events [...]
Third grade is a turning point in learning, where students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Thus, many education systems now focus on early literacy. There’s a lot of work to do: the National Center of Education Statistics measured in 2015 that only 36% of 4th graders nationwide were proficient in reading. [...]
A crucial but often overlooked consideration when working with data is: what is the best way to organise it? The way we organise our data can change not only how we interact with it, but also our mental model of that data. A well-designed database should efficiently organise both the data that we have now, [...]