Data Science for Social Good

Today's guest post is written by Travis Turney, co-founder of Data Science ATL.Last year something incredible happened at the University of Chicago. Thirty-six aspiring data scientists spent their summer working in small teams on challenging real-world problems in education, health, energy, transportation, and more to directly benefit their local communities in need. They applied their coding and analytics skills under guidance of mentors from industry, academia, and the chief data scientist from the 2012 Obama campaign, Rayid Ghani (@rayidghani).These graduate and undergraduate fellows came from quantitative and computational fields spanning computer science, machine learning, statistics, and public policy. The results were simply amazing and changed the lives of the fellows forever as leaders in data science with the skills and passion to change their local communities for the better.This summer the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Summer Fellowship program is coming to Atlanta through the support of Georgia Tech and the City of Atlanta! DSSG will be a landmark event for data science in our city. Our hope is that Fellows, mentors, and project partners will be able to benefit from national exposure of their works through a demo day at the end of the summer and that the efforts of Fellows will be implemented by some of the project partners to benefit the Atlanta Metro Area. Also, our hope is that DSSG becomes an annual event going forward and builds into a premier showcase for Georgia Tech and Atlanta.The long term benefit of a program like this to Atlanta is to foster a concentration of data scientists and data-savvy business and non-profit leaders to come to and remain in Atlanta. These leaders are likely to become professors, non-profit leaders, or start new data-centric businesses to grow and foster economic development in Atlanta.If you are interested in applying to be a DSSG fellow, mentor, project partner, or just to be updated about future events please go to DSSG-ATL.io to join our mailing list.