Read recent news and blog posts from our team
Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship to return for 2014
Program seeks fellows, mentors and partners After a successful first summer, in which aspiring data scientists from around the world completed innovative data and analytics projects with non-profit and government [...]
DSSG Fellowship Planning Workshop: Nov 14-15
Due to a lot of interest from other universities (and cities) in running similar programs next summer, we are conducting a workshop to recap what we learned over the summer [...]
Divvy: Helping Chicago’s New Bike Share Find Its Balance
“Wow! What is that? Where’d you get it?,” the beach-going twentysomething asked me. I looked up from the map on my phone and steadied the powder-blue bike under me to [...]
CTA: Why Bus Crowding Happens and How Data Can Help
We've all been there: standing at an intersection, waiting for the bus to come. Passengers keep arriving at the stop, and you start to realize you could have a crowded [...]
The Match Game: Measuring the National Impact of Nurse-Family Partnership
There are thousands of organizations around the country that are dedicated to helping people in need. Yet despite those good intentions, few of those organizations are scientifically rigorous in evaluating [...]
Fellow profile: Nathan Leiby
The core goal of the Data Science for Social Good fellowship is to connect technically skilled people to social problems. For Nathan Leiby, this is already familiar territory. Leiby is [...]
The Dark Matter of Public Policy Data (Part 2): Statistical Solutions
Part one of this series talked about the “dark matter” of public policy data -- the invisible factors not present in a dataset that can distort an evaluation of a [...]
Ushahidi: Machine Learning for Human Rights
"2-car acc @ State & Lake, both drivers injred" That short, hastily typed text message or tweet contains a lot of information that police, emergency responders, news organizations and drivers [...]
Cook County Land Bank, Part 1: The Problem
Boarded up buildings and overgrown lots have plagued Chicago's low-income neighborhoods for decades. Over the past five years, however, vacant and abandoned properties have spread beyond the inner city and [...]
Why Data Science Needs Openness
I cringe a little at the term data science. It conveys all the hype and false-promise you'd expect of an occupation recently described as the "sexiest job of the 21st [...]