We spent much of the first week of the fellowship getting fellows up to speed on git, python, R, and other data science tools. The idea was to give everyone a shared sense of what's out there so they can collaborate and teach other over the summer. We've invited a few of our fellows to [...]
The Data Science for Social Good fellowship is just getting started. Fellow Skyler Whorton wrote a blog post reflecting on week one of the program. We've brought thirty six fellows with diverse backgrounds and perspectives to Chicago. So let's hear from a few more voices about how things are going so far. For our first [...]
Imagine you are asked to compare patient outcomes at area hospitals. In minutes, you can pull the Medicare data for 30-day mortality rates after a heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia, and start crunching numbers. But say Hospital A is in a low-income neighborhood with high rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions. [...]
In Mexico, drug cartels are locked in violent rivalries that profoundly affect the entire country and its population. The history of this ongoing struggle is complex and steeped in political controversy, but some believe that careful analysis of the past may help the Mexican government curb the violence. This was the guiding maxim for Andrea [...]
This was the question asked of us by Paul O’Connor last Friday, at the first of our weekly lunch speaker series. O’Connor is an urban strategist at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who formerly headed a business development nonprofit called World Business Chicago. On top of that, he’s a native Chicagoan as well as a local [...]
Our goals for the fellowship are to train more data scientists and to get them working on problems that really matter. Lots of folks have been asking about how we're doing that. Data scientists are a hybrid group with computer science, statistics, machine learning, data mining, and database skills. These skills take years to learn [...]
They're here! Despite canceled flights, eleventh hour visas, stolen laptops, hellish final exams, and a last minute internet installation, our inaugural fellows poured into our new office this morning. We spent our first day getting to know the program, and each other. Program director Rayid Ghani kicked things off by welcoming mentors, staff, and fellows. [...]
The data deluge As technology penetrates further into everyday life, we're creating lots of data. (We could quote all the Gartner and Forrester made-up numbers, but we'll spare you.) Businesses are scrambling to find data scientists - a hybrid of computer scientist, statistician, and domain expert - to make sense of all this data and [...]
