DSSGx 2022
The DSSGx 2022 programme was run face to face at The University of Warwick campus, over 12 weeks, from 6 June to 26 August. It was great to have the teams back on campus, being able to work together and share their skills and experience and make use of the great facilities that the university can offer.
There was collaboration with the DSSGx programme run at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. Support was provided by The Turing Institute, Aridhia and Microsoft.
DSSGx UK 2022 was delivered under the DSSGx UK chapter of the DSSG Foundation.
The DSSGx UK 2022 Team
The DSSGx 2022 team consists of fellows from around the world, who have been selected following a rigorous application and interview process. They are supported by Technical Mentors and Project Managers with extensive experience in the field of Data Science. And this was backed up by the team from The University of Warwick as well as many supportive volunteers, who contributed their time to various tasks within the programme.
DSSGx offers an invaluable training environment and insight into the practical problems and issues that impact on not-for-profit organisations and the methods that will be able to benefit them in the longer term, that can actually be applied and delivered. The fellows learn and develop their skills and project team working and experience the impact that their solutions can have in the real world.
Thoughts from some of those taking part in 2022 are:
“I had a great opportunity to work with non-profit organizations, helping them work through challenges using Data Science. DSSGx pushes you onto doing greater things, overcoming challenges, and definitely brings out the best in you.”
Pranjusmrita Kalita
"Summer as a fellow in DSSGx UK was a transformative experience. For 12 weeks, I immersed myself in a uniquely diverse environment with like-minded, problem-driven, skillful, ingenious, supportive, and passionate people about pressing social issues.”
Daniela Pinto Veizaga
“I could think of no better way to spend my summer than at this program!”
Li-Lian Ang
"DSSGx Summer Fellowship at the University Of Warwick, UK has been a fantastic journey for me. Through this fellowship, I was able to learn and explore a lot of new things and level up my data science skills while developing an understanding of using my data science skills for social good. DSSGx UK is the best opportunity to apply data science skills to real-world problems by working with NGOs and government agencies to do our bit for making a social impact on millions of lives and trust me, there is no better feeling than that. You also get to work with people from all around the world and make new friends and expand your network, which makes the whole experience even more special. I definitely recommend it to all the students who want to use their skills to change the world."
Shriya Chaitanya Kamat Tarcar
Projects
DSSGx projects are suggested by our partner organisations and are data-driven challenges that will have significant impact on socially important problems. The projects in 2022 represent a diverse and global set of partnerships, with different challenges presented to the teams.
The projects require close working with the project partner and the efforts by the fellows are extremely well appreciated. Save the Children have made the following observation:
“High-quality and granual data on child poverty is essential for governments, civil society organisations and many others to better understand and address violations of child rights. But in many cases, we don't know exactly where the poorest children live. The DSSG fellows have done an extraordinary work to build a publicly accessible model which predicts child poverty on a very local level. We are now continuing expanding this analysis to many more countries and are excited using this work in our advocacy and policy work going forward.”
Oliver Fiala, Save the Children
Take a look at the problems presented to this years fellows:
Buckinghamshire Council & EY Foundation – Supporting Young People
In this project, we are be working with Buckinghamshire Council to predict and identify children with high risk of becoming NEET (Not Employed, in Education or Training), which is linked to a higher likelihood of unemployment, low wages, and lower quality of work later in life. Based on the prediction, Buckinghamshire Council will be able to provide additional support to the children at risk, with the goal of reducing the rate of NEETs from 7% to below the national average of 5.5%. The tool will also be usable by other councils.
UNICEF & Save the Children – Child Poverty
This is a joint project between UNICEF and Save the Children to predict multi-dimensional child poverty in developing countries, to optimise both organisation’s resource allocation, national policy planning and ongoing advocacy across 50+ wide-ranging projects. These programs impact 197 million children each year alone in immunization, sanitation, nutrition and education outcomes. We will take reference from Facebook’s Data4Good publications on the Global Wealth Index and use multiple data formats from satellite imagery to local survey data to create a resource prioritization application.
St Basils – Youth Homelessness
St Basils is a highly successful charity organisation providing support to 4,000 young adults aged 16 – 25 years old every year, who are homeless or in immediate danger of becoming homeless. They would like us to build a model to predict the probability of a positive outcome depending on levels of support received for new clients, and their critical status during the point of intake when they start using St Basils services.
Pure Leapfrog & West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) – Carbon Zero
In this project, we will be supporting two organizations, WMCA and Pure Leapfrog, on their quest to lead the United Kingdom to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2041. We will be helping them to predict and identify urgent candidate homes that would require infrastructure retrofitting, through predicting, clustering, and imputing missing EPC rating values for over 500,000 houses.
DSSGx 2022 Public Lectures
DSSG arranges a series of public lectures each year, with top speakers from data and social science providing insight and inspiration into their own area of specialism. This year talks included topics such as 'Ethics in data science', "visualisation during the pandemic" ' and 'How Data Science can support social good at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence'. 2022 talks are available here. Last years talks are also available here.
DSSGx 2022: Datafest
The closing event of DSSGx UK is a celebration event and an opportunity to find out about the work undertaken by our fellows.
The keynote talk was given by Gaia Marcus, a member of the Cabinet Office, who has previously worked on the National Data Science Strategy. Each of the DSSGx project teams gave a presentation on the problem they had been given and how they came up with a solution, getting it ready to handover to the project partner. A video of the whole event can be found here.
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