Overview of Data Science for the Public Good Program - social-and-decision-analytics-lab/2016-summer_students GitHub Wiki

Imagine if communities could understand what factors drive the usage of community services, what organizations best serve their constituents, what neighborhoods are served or under-served by transportation, health and human services, and how best to reach at-risk individuals. A community with this ability to understand its internal working and the impact of policies and activities would have the power to create significant social benefits. And now imagine if you could contribute to informing and creating these social benefits.

The Virginia Tech Biocomplexity Institute’s Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory (SDAL) created and conducts the Data Science for the Public Good (DSPG) program. The program engages young scholars in finding solutions to some of our most pressing social issues. Cities and metropolitan areas are positioning themselves at the cutting edge of reform. They are fast becoming the engines of social transformation and economic prosperity; they are experimenting, taking risks, and making the hard choices required to address disparities in healthcare and education, and in economic, social, and criminal justice. The DSPG program is positioned to partner with government leaders to provide the data-driven evidence necessary for cities and metropolitan areas to build an equitable and sustainable social transformation.

Rationale: Our communities are in a tremendous struggle to manage the conflicting forces threatening their ability to survive and innovate. Communities must be able to provide health, safety, security, employment and leisure to their community that is becoming increasingly diverse in an environment of constricting resources, increasing inequality, rapidly increasing technological innovations, and growing global networks.

Program Overview: DSPG fellows directly participate in research with local, state, and federal civil servants and community leaders. Fellows are a mix of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars. Fellows conduct research at the interface of statistics, computation, and social and behavioral sciences. Vast amounts of data, generated through almost every aspect of living, offer an unprecedented opportunity to improve the health, well-being, and quality of life of our communities. Working together the DSPG program strives to help communities learn how to use their own data flows to sources to tackle the question “What works, for whom, and in what context?” DSPG fellows leave the program with a passion for working on public good issues that will shape a healthy future for where we all live, learn, work, and play.

The DSPG program teaches fellows how to sift through the vast amounts of data involving public safety, provision of services, and employment to discover how best to move their communities forward. Through the lenses of statistics, social science, and data science research, fellows and their mentors, DSPG fellows will integrate community knowledge and all data resources to bring data-driven understanding to:

Identify community issues through our community engagement process to work with local government leaders.
Develop mechanisms to bring local government leaders together with goal to frame their questions more broadly and share their data across programs to address these issues.
Create two-way pipeline for data and geospatial (mapping) tools to give local leaders access to researcher analysis and researchers easier access local administrative data flows. This has the potential to lay the foundation for developing the future workforce at the local level.

During the course of administering public services and allocating resources, an abundance of data is generated. The story of the community is in these data. Our overarching research question for the DSPG program is how to bring this story to light and make it accessible to local governments. This provides a rich and mutually rewarding opportunity to leverage community knowledge and massive data resources with statistics, social science, and data science research.

Activities and Mentoring:

The DSPG fellows participate simultaneously in multiple data-driven research projects focused on community and social analytics. DSPG fellow activities are part of interdisciplinary research teams that horizontally integrate statistics, data science, and social and behavioral sciences and vertically integrate undergraduates, graduates, postdoctoral associates, research faculty, and local, state, and federal agency leadership.

The collaborating government leadership is interested in applying evidence-based approaches to improving sustainability and resiliency in local county and city settings. For an example of our past research with Arlington County Fire Department, see https://collaboration.vbi.vt.edu/display/FPSDSP/Our+Work+with+Arlington+County.

DSPG fellows prepare for and participate in professional training and development workshops, poster presentations, and technical report and publication writing. Formal workshops are given at the beginning of the session on Data Science to introduce scientific and statistical computing tools such as R, Python, GIS, other software tools as needed for projects. Workshops also include accessing and using local, state and federal data resources such as Census products and local open data portals. A related set of workshops and seminars on statistical and social science topics are presented throughout the semester.

Each DSPG fellow has post-doctoral and senior researcher mentors. The mentors guide their research as well as engage in discussions about future career opportunities, with a focus on public service. DSPG fellows actively participate in sponsor meetings, presentations, and other events.

Leveraging our location in the National Capital Region, excursions are organized to events at AAAS, National Academies, Congressional Hearings, and to experience other Washington Metropolitan science and technology activities. Fellows attend the SDAL seminar series with national and international speakers from government, academia, and industry. The program is funded through multiple sources: Virginia Tech’s Global Forum for Urban and Regional Resilience (GFURR); American Statistical Association’s NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU); and sponsored research.