The past few years have seen an increasing demand for machine learning/data mining/data science powers. That's wonderful for us "data scientists," but wouldn't the world be so much better if we also used our computational and analytical powers for social good? In this talk, I'll give examples from work going on around the world, including from the summer fellowship program we started at University of Chicago on "Data Science for Social Good," to show that there are a lot of important social problems in the world that could use our help—from helping students graduate high school to helping disaster victims to improving health.
Speaker(s)
Rayid Ghani
Rayid Ghani is the director of the Center for Data Science & Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is also the co-founder of Edgeflip, an analytics and social media startup that is focused on helping non-profits and social causes. Previously, Rayid was the chief scientist for the Obama 2012 Election Campaign focusing on analytics, data, and technology.
Rayid is focused on education, research, and developing approaches to use machine learning, data science, and other related buzzwords for social causes, both with Edgeflip and the University of Chicago. His research interests range from active learning, semi-supervised learning, text analysis to the intersection of machine learning and social science methods in order to solve large-scale social and policy problems.