Addressing two major challenges:

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

Improved Stimulation Protocols for Sight Restoration Technologies

With Ione Fine and Geoff Boynton, Department of Psychology

pulse2percept

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

The Urban Data Science for Social Good Summer Program

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 cleaning