Data Science for Social Good

The Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship is a University of Chicago summer program for aspiring data scientists to work on data mining, machine learning, big data, and data science projects with social impact. Working closely with governments and nonprofits, fellows take on real-world problems in education, health, energy, transportation, economic development, international development, and more. For three months in Chicago they hone and apply their coding, analytics, and data science skills, collaborate in a fast-paced atmosphere, and learn from mentors coming from industry and academia. The 2015 program is bringing 42 aspiring data scientists from across the world to Chicago. They are graduate and undergraduate students from quantitative and computational fields - from computer science and machine learning to statistics, math, and physical sciences, to social sciences, public health and public policy. From end of May to the end of August, they will work in small teams of 3-4 on data science projects in partnership with nonprofits and government agencies. These project teams will collaborate with our project partners to tackle high impact problems, analyzing different types of data, and learning from full-time mentors, who serve as project leads and technical advisors.