slidenumbers: true
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. -- Jeff Hammerbacher (Co-founder Facebook)
^ now cloudera
- identifying supporters likely to donate
- predicting where services will be needed
- predicting impact of campaigns
- forecasting trends and changes
This is already happening...1
- supported by the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Foundation
- 6 month fellowship
- taking applications for 3rd year (started 2013)
- Partners: NGOs, Governments
^ started by Rayid Ghani (Obama’s Chief data scientist)
- World Bank Group – Prediction & Identification of Collusion in International Development Projects
- Chicago Public Schools – Student Enrollment Prediction for Budget Allocation
- Pecan Street , WikiEnergy – Building Open Source Tools to Analyze Smart Meter Data
Partner: Nurse-Family Partnership
DSSG analyzed who was „benefiting the most“ from NFP’s Program.
http://dssg.uchicago.edu/2014/08/27/nfp-undefinable-unmeasurable.html
^ sends nurses into homes of young, low-income, first-time mothers where they serve also as confidant and counselors until babies are 2 years old ^ 19 years ago RCTs to measure success ^ now rolled out to all over US ^ DSSG helped with impact analysis ^ RCTs would be expensive ^ first year: compare enrolled mothers to counterfactual population ^ second year: define success metrics ^ success = mothers leave the program? Stay whole time?
visit http://dssg.io/projects/
- like DSSG Chicago
- mainly funded by Oracle and Georgia Tech
- started 2014 (one year after Chicago)
Bayes Impact is a nonprofit that deploys data scientists to solve big social problems with civic and nonprofit organizations
- started this year
- 12-month Fellowship
^ Full-Time long-term fellowships
- Increasing Graduation Rate And Optimizing Class Offerings For UC Riverside
- Improving Outcomes For Emotionally And Behaviorally Challenged Children With Youth Villages
- Stratification Of Parkinson's Disease Patients
- Optimizing Ambulance Response Times In Sf
One weekend, impact the world
http://bayeshack.challengepost.com/submissions
^ curious to see how many will be alive in 6 months ^ image on right shows winner
drive technology innovation to fight child sexual exploitation -- http://www.wearethorn.org/thorn-innovation-lab
http://www.wearethorn.org/thorn-innovation-lab/
^ What do they do?
- started this year (2014)
- currently 3 competitions
^ https://www.kaggle.com/c/kdd-cup-2014-predicting-excitement-at-donors-choose ^ donors choose lets teachers enter projects for crowdfunding
had a
Workshop on Data Science for Social Good
^ Bottom of this page has lots of DSSG papers
We're tackling the world's biggest problems through data science. -- http://www.datakind.org
DataKind connects charities with data scientists by organizing two-day data dives where those data scientists help solve the charities’ data problems.
DataKind helped GiveDirectly – an NGO making unconditional cash transfers to poor households via mobile phones in Kenia and Uganda2 – to identify especially needy villages through satellite image analysis3.
^ predictive model to estimate number of roofs ^ and percentage of thatched / metal roofs ^ crowdsourced training data ^ template matching ^ 100 person days of manual effort saved
[fit] View the presentation
[fit] or read the paper
To help prioritize the many calls for help reaching Amnesty International’s Urgent Action Network DataKind volunteers have created a predictive model that analyzes messages for potential escalation.45
Combining data from Shooting Star Chase, public data about the hospice and healthcare sector and demographic data DataKind volunteers calculated predicted demand against hospice capacity to reveal areas of possible shortage.6
^ + a few other things
Most of DataKinds projects have been tackled by volunteers on 2-day data dives.
^ Who has been on a data dive?
(by voluntary data ambassadors in collaboration with the challenge partner – starting ~2 month before the data dive)
- anonymization/pseudonymization
- cleaning/fixing
- ensuring proper (machine readable) data formats
Any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start with a question, NOT the data. -- Jake Porway in https://hbr.org/2013/03/you-cant-just-hack-your-way-to/
- Challenge partners pitch their problems
- Volunteers create analyses, models and visualizations (led by data ambassadors) in two intense days of hacking
- solutions are being presented at the end
^ Data Ambassadors important
Social organizations still don’t have the expertise: data ambassadors must help implement the solutions
^ Not yet quite clear to me ^ Sent DataKind and email to clarify
^ Not yet quite clear to me
There is currently no organization in Germany comparable to DataKind.
There is currently no organization in Germany comparable to DataKind.
- Daniel Kirsch
- Marit Brademann
- Richard Lawrence
- Tobias Pfaff (of dataforgood.co)
- You?
^ Detexify, Co-founded OK Lab Münster
- Klaas Bollhöfer, Chief Data Scientist, The Unbelievable Machine Company
- Adam Drake, Chief Data Scientist, Zanox
- to prepare data before data dives
- lead teams at data dives
- help with the implementation afterwards
The international of the Data Science for Social Good-movement shows that data scientists are eager to donate their skills.
Social organizations need to understand how we can help them. Are you in contact with NGOs? Spread the word!
Daniel Kirsch [email protected] @kirel
No website yet... No name... just contact me!
- Foto of Jeff Hammberbacher by Fred Brenenson licensed under CC BY 2.0
Footnotes
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...but not in Germany (afaik) ↩
-
http://www.ted.com/talks/joy_sun_should_you_donate_differently ↩
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http://www.datakind.org/projects/using-the-simple-to-be-radical/ ↩
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http://www.datakind.org/projects/using-predictive-analytics-to-prevent-human-rights-abuses/ ↩
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/amnesty-international-considers-using-big-data-to-predict-human-rights-violations/2013/11/22/3f4f1a1e-5388-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html ↩