Data Science Coast to Coast
‘Why We Can’t Wait’: Using Social Justice to Transform Data Science
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Time: 12:00 PM Pacific / 3:00 PM Eastern
Location: Live Webcast
Speaker: Talitha Washington, Director, AUCC Data Science Initiative
Abstract: Located in the "Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement", the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative has a keen focus to advance social justice through data science. The AUC is a consortium of four historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Atlanta, Georgia: Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College. The inaugural director of the AUC Data Science Initiative, Dr. Talitha Washington, hopes to move data science towards ethics and fairness for Black America because “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Talitha Washington is the new Director of the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC) Data Science Initiative. Dr. Washington’s experience includes inventive leadership in math education, research methodologies, and partnership development, and she has served most recently as a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a tenured associate professor at Howard University. Her multifaceted career includes the management of use-inspired convergence research to solve complex societal challenges, and she has published groundbreaking work on nonstandard finite difference (NSFD) methodologies developed for various systems of differential equations. Her work at NSF facilitated the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge with data science -- using methods including predictive artificial intelligence and economic and labor market analyses -- leading to innovation and the development of educational technologies connecting workers with the jobs of the future.
The Data Science Coast to Coast (DSC2C) seminars present leaders in data science whose research spans the theory and methodology of data science, and their application in arts and humanities, engineering, biomedical, natural, physical and social sciences. The series was launched in fall 2020, hosted jointly by BIDS, NYU’s Center for Data Science, Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute, Stanford Data Science, the University of Michigan’s Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and the University of Washington’s eScience Institute. All events in the series are free to attend, and all who are interested are welcome and encouraged to attend. Event Contact: Questions may be directed to Jing Liu (ljing@umich.edu), Managing Director of MIDAS.