Show HN: A data science fellowship to solve the world’s toughest problems

http://www.bayesimpact.org/fellowship

by pyduan • 12 years ago

80 25 12 years ago

bayesimpact.org

murtza• 12 years ago

To get more exposure, consider posting the fellowship to these subreddits:

http://www.reddit.com/r/datascience

http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/

http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics

http://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning/

If you have not already, I would recommend reaching out to these companies to sponsor: Cloudera, Palantir, New Relic, Tableau, Domo.

ajiang7• 12 years ago

Awesome - thanks for the feedback. We're indeed going to post to those subreddits and reach out to those companies to potentially sponsor us. If you know a good contact, we'd love to be introduced!

denzil• 12 years ago

You will also probably find people interested in this on: http://lesswrong.com/

shoyer• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate on what a "Fully funded fellowship" means? I'm guess it's vague because you haven't figured out how much support you'll be able to provide yet?

ajiang7• 12 years ago

Hi Shoyer, one of the founders here! For our fall fellowship, support will likely be in the range of $4,000-6,000 per month based on experience. We also provide a fellowship house in San Francisco for our fellows to live in.

hsshah• 12 years ago

Hi ajiang, This is a great initiative. Glad to see Data Science knowledge put to use for noble causes. I am a mentor in a Data science/analytics program based in Bay Area where we help professionals looking for a career change to data science. We are always hunting for interesting projects for them to work on. Would love to have them work on real projects with noble goals. Love to connect to discuss this possibility. If interested, please ping me. You can find my email in my profile. Thanks.

balsam• 12 years ago

I am hunting on your webpage for program dates but can't find any... how would the fellowship work if I'm a grad student?

rlazer• 12 years ago

This is an awesome initiative. It's good to see an organization using and promoting data science for something other than "optimizing click ads." Kick some ass guys!

corydominguez• 12 years ago

I love the last item in the FAQ,

I am a frequentist. Can I still join Bayes Impact?

kfor• 12 years ago

Always glad to see these skills put to uses besides selling products and eyeballs!

Here's another fellowship using data science towards non-commercial goals (global health research): http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/fellowships

Full disclosure: I participated in the fellowship in 2008.

ajiang7• 12 years ago

Hi kfor, the fellowship program sounds really interesting. Do you mind chatting with our team and telling us about your experience?

micro_cam2• 12 years ago

I appreciate what you guys are trying to do but I can't seen many mathematicians or statisticians applying for this unless you provide a little more information about what these "hard" problems are.

Honestly it reads like your offering basic in training in a a random selection of tools and then hoping some non profits present a problem with nice clean data that can be solved through application of a few methods from scikit.learn.

If you wan't to attract math people my suggestion would be to identify a few intriguing and hard problems a head of time and taking applications specifically for them...you can always suggest a change if you think an applicant would be better suited to a different one. Providing intriguing problems that might match up with peoples pre existing research interests is key...there is lots of room for cross pollination and growth but a bayesian statistician is going to be much more intrigued by something that might benefit from a hierarchical model then something that needs ODE's or online convex optimization.

Worse 4-6 months might not even be enough time to formulate a problem that needs a solution and get the required data in place. Non profits are generally extremely overworked and take a long time to do things. They will not have their data in anything resembling a database or standardized format...think short hand notes in word files if you're lucky. Identifying people and data you can work with on this end a head of time is key.

For the record I work for a non profit analyzing complex diseases and my background is in math. I've also sat on the board of and been involved in a few other non profits.

pyduan2• 12 years ago

Paul from Bayes Impact here. I appreciate the sentiment, though in all respect it does seem like most of your concerns are addressed on the website, either on the fellowship page or in the others.

unless you provide a little more information about what these "hard" problems are

The second paragraph does go briefly over the problems we are currently working on (granted, not in much detail for the sake of brevity, but enough to give an idea of what type of challenges they are). There is a little bit more information on the front page, but granted since we started Bayes Impact two months ago we haven't been able to put as much work into the website content as we'd like to.

Honestly it reads like your offering basic in training in a a random selection of tools

This is simply not the case -- while their level of experience varies, our current fellows actually comprise some well-established data scientists in their own right. It is precisely because the problems worth solving are tough to solve that we need to round up talented individuals who are able to commit to working on social impact projects full-time and pair them up with industry and domain experts who have the domain knowledge but may not have the time.

They each bring their own set of skills -- for example, someone who built Lyft's grid optimization system might be uniquely suited to help save lives by improving ambulance and fire truck dispatch and reducing average emergency response times.

and then hoping some non profits present a problem with nice clean data that can be solved through application of a few methods from scikit.learn

This is precisely the point of Bayes Impact and why a longer engagement model such as fellowships is needed in the space (most current data science for social good organizations work on a volunteer basis model), so we have the time to build these longer relationships with nonprofits to leverage data science even in cases where data is messy or sensitive. We go a little bit more in-depth about it on our article here: http://blog.bayesimpact.org/blog/the-bayes-impact-mission/

Worse 4-6 months might not even be enough time to formulate a problem that needs a solution

This is why they're not 4-6 months, but typically 6-12. We do have a pilot 3 month program in the summer for problems that are comparatively easier to work on.

and then hoping some non profits present a problem with nice clean data that can be solved through application of a few methods from scikit.learn

This is why we have a fellowship application page and not a project application page -- we actually tend to identify and scope projects ourselves.

On that note though, I want to point out there is no need to be so overly dismissive of the work nonprofit and civic organizations have been doing in collecting and storing clean data. For example, most fire departments we talked to had surprisingly good data, and some such as the Fire Department of New York had even started initiatives of their own to use data science to improve their processes. For example, by integrating building permit data with their own systems, they've been able to direct inspectors where fire were predicted to be more likely to occur.

One direction we've been headed towards is seeking these data-educated organizations to create pilot projects, then use the results of these as a basis to export these solutions in similar institutions whose data practices may not be as good. In that end, we are helped by some data engineers from companies like Splunk or Cloudera so we do believe in working with these organizations in the long run to bring them up to speed. This is precisely the problem we're trying to solve with our model!

For the record I work for a non profit analyzing complex diseases

Then you might be interested in the project we are doing on Parkinson's with the Michael J. Fox Foundation! Feel free to email me for more details.

micro_cam2• 12 years ago

I'm trying to offer constructive, if harsh, criticism based on my own experience which includes recruiting for similar positions and working with large and small 501(c)(3)'s.

I don't mean to come off as dismissive but to suggest that your write up is vague to the point of being easily dismissed and provide feedback on how someone from outside your local peer group might read this.

And there are organizations out there with great IT and clean data but I and most people in this field have lost months writing hideous combinations of NLP and regular expression to pull data out of old medical records and things and hand validate it or correct for batch effect in supposedly clean data.

I think that fleshing out the projects and areas of investigation you guys already have lined up would go a long ways towards addressing my concerns and making the program more appealing to the typical analytical folks i've worked with. I'd also suggest focusing the intensive course on analytical methods not the tools, this is what will intrigue people with expertise. At the moment it reads like it is focused at people new the the field with no programing experience.

What data sets/types are you using for the Parkinson's thing? My main focus is on analysis methods that resist the noise, imbalance, heterogeneity and other issues typical in extremely wide/multivariate genetic+clinical+proteomic studies...a few sentences about the study in the write up would have told me a lot about if my skills could be useful. (I'm not looking to relocate but I am always open to collaborations and correspondence with people working on similar things.)

roscoebeezie• 12 years ago

This sounds amazing.

lightcatcher• 12 years ago

For those who think this is an awesome idea, but that don't want to relocate and/or work full-time, I recommend you check out the similarly minded http://www.datakind.org/

shankysingh• 12 years ago

Thanks for the link man, this really look wonderfull.

ntoshev• 12 years ago

I have a vehicle routing solution (minimal routes via multiple destinations, with time windows, capacity constraints, weekly scheduling; it's a website service on top of Google Maps) that I would be happy to provide for free to social impact projects. Email is in my profile if you're interested.

gulbrandr• 12 years ago

This site does not work properly on Firefox, because of cross-origin requests of fonts.

  downloadable font: download failed (font-family: "sinkin_sans600_semibold" style:normal weight:normal stretch:normal src index:1): 
  bad URI or cross-site access not allowed
  source: http://d1arcc3qu8ndpn.cloudfront.net/fonts/SinkinSans-600SemiBold-webfont.woff

ajiang7• 12 years ago

Thanks gulbrandr! We're fixing right now

Show HN: A data science fellowship to solve the world’s toughest problems

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