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What is DSSGx?

A 12-week summer programme bringing together some of the top talent from data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to work on real-world data science challenges and deliver positive social impact.

Click here to find out more about the programme.

News

Work with us

DSSGx works with not-for-profit organisations and governmental bodies to identify projects for our fellows to work on. If you have a project you think is suitable, find out more here.

Buckinghamshire Council and EY Foundation

This project worked with Buckinghamshire Council to predict and identify children with a 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.

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Projects from previous years:

For see more projects - 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022

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.

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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.

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Mapping the world’s offline population

The project is in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for all matters related to information and communication technology.

ITU’s mission is to facilitate connecting all the world's people and to protect and support everyone's right to communicate.​ ITU and UNICEF have joined forces in the Giga initiative in a bid to connect every school to the Internet by 2030. Aside from directly benefitting children, schools often act as community hubs and so connecting a school often connects the surrounding community too.

This project aims to integrate a number of different data sources to provide real-time estimates of the number of offline people in local areas that would benefit from extending Internet connectivity. The new model will inform the prioritisation of infrastructure projects within Giga as well as policy and decision making at the community level more broadly, and enhance the understanding and use of national and local level internet connectivity data.


Project in partnership with ITU.

Prioritising environmental complaints

This project is a collaboration with the Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) in Chile. SMA is a public service responsible for conducting environmental inspections and ensuring compliance of thousands of facilities to protect the environment and public health.

Due to its limited budget, SMA cannot afford to respond to all citizen demands so it must prioritize where to allocate its efforts. Thousands of citizen complaints are received yearly on a wide range of environmental problems, and this figure has quadruplicated the past year with the launch of online complaints. Each citizen complaint needs to be analysed, and where relevant, lead to inspection and sanction processes.

The project will use a mix of structured (e.g., facility information) and unstructured (e.g., description of environmental problems) data to attempt to prioritise complaints by identifying those that are more likely to lead to grave sanctions as well as those that are outside of the SMA remit. This will help SMA attend to some of the environmental and public health issues that require pressing attention.


Project in partnership with SMA.

Join with us:

Applications for DSSG 2023 are now open!

For undergraduate or postgraduates at a higher education institute, DSSGx provides an unrivalled opportunity to spend the summer working with an international team of data scientists on a project with real social impact.

DSSGx gives aspiring data scientists the opportunity to refine their data science skills through intense training, and by working in small supervised teams on real-world data mining, machine learning, and data science projects. Participants will work with global non-profit organisations and government bodies to make a real-world social impact with their data, by improving their services, interventions, and outreach.

Teams will be supported by technical mentors and project managers, and alongside the project runs a training programme that will be flexibly adapted to cover the needs of the team and the project.

If you have a passion for data science, care about the social good and want to work in an international team, we would welcome your application. Feedback from previous participants is exceptionally positive and while most of our fellows are late stage undergraduate or graduate students, including PhD students, we look at skills, not at the number of university years.

Admission is highly selective. We usually receive hundreds of applications for a very small number of places (around 16 places each year). The recruitment process involves completing the application form and, if selected, two rounds of interviews, looking at technical competencies in addition to finding out more about each selected applicant.

This is an intense, 12-week, full-time internship. All selected fellows will receive a stipend covering their living costs and expenses. Accommodation and travel will be provided for DSSGx UK. Travel will be provided for DSSGx Germany, with an option for accommodation.

It is anticipated that DSSGx UK 2023 will be held in person at the University of Warwick. Dates for the 2023 programme at Warwick will be 5 June - 25 August 2023. At Kaiserslautern it will be held 12 June - 1 September 2023.

The application form for 2023 is available here - please read the information at the top of the form carefully.

For further information and if you have any questions about the programme, please check the FAQs.

As a sponsor

We're looking for sponsors to work with our projects and third sector partners, as well as core sponsors that share our vision, aim and values. The programme attracts incredible talent and supports them to deliver high impact, data driven projects for social good. Sponsors continue to benefit from the reputation of the programme and alignment with project goals long after the summer programme ends.

To learn more, please contact dssg@wbs.ac.uk

As a project partner

If you're a non-profit or government organisation with a data science challenge, you can apply to become a project partner.

The Opportunity:

DSSGx is looking for project partners who want to tackle critical social challenges and believe that data can improve their operations and interventions with tangible social impact.

As a project partner, you get:

  • a strong data science team that cares about your challenges
  • a prototype solution (report, predictive model and software) that helps solve your problem using data science tools
  • exposure and training — for the project at hand but also how to tackle these projects technically as well as through validation.

All of this comes free of charge (although running DSSGx is costly, and we would appreciate a voluntary contribution where possible).

How does it work?

Each non-profit organisation is matched together with a data science team of 3 - 4 outstanding international students (undergraduate to PhD) who will develop a tailored approach to the organisation’s challenge over the summer. Their academic strength is complemented by professional technical mentors and project managers. The latter ensure that the time is used efficiently, the deliverables for each week are achieved and that the organisation’s goals are met.

The aim overall is to combine the training of students and recent graduates with the delivery of tangible data products that can help the third sector embed AI and data science into their operations. The DSSGx 2023 programme is anticipated to run at the University of Warwick campus.

Deadline and requirements

The initial deadline for applications is the 16th December 2022.

Project applications will go through a scoping process with data science experts to ensure feasibility and agree goals and deliverables. The partner organisation must be able to commit one day a week equivalent through the summer to take part.

If you're interested in becoming a project partner, we have an initial 'Expression of Interest' form here.

Although we have an initial close date of 16th December 2022 for the 2023 programme, we're happy to hear about possible projects all through the year, so please get in touch.


Here's what previous partners have said about us

“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

"The DSSG experience has been amazing – the fellows are embarrassingly smart and I’m impressed by the quality of their work and their dedication to the project."

Youlia Lozanova, ITU

"As Superintendent of Environment of Chile, we are pleased to have participated in the DSSGx program with the project of environmental complaints prioritization. Soon after we began working together, we noticed the compromise of the team which not only ended up translating into a high-quality product but also gave us many insights about the particular problem and the complaint process in general. It has been a wonderful experience for us and we highly recommend being part of this initiative to other organizations who want to get the most of their data and engage with a team of bright professionals."

Pablo Aguirre Hörmann, SMA

As a Technical Mentor or Project Manager

DSSGx UK is seeking paid, full-time Technical Mentors for 2023 (14 weeks, fixed-term).

  • Technical Mentors typically have a strong technical background, often a PhD in data science, computer science, statistics, social science or public policy, plus several years of industry experience.
  • Project Managers typically have a background in delivering technical projects, with strong relationship management skills.

In either role you'll work with top international data science talent on projects that really matter.

To find out more, visit Job Opportunities

As a volunteer

We are looking for socially-minded volunteers with data science experience to lend their time and expertise to help deliver DSSGx 2021.

For more information and to put yourself forward please contact dssg@wbs.ac.uk


Organisers

University of Warwick

  • Marya Bazzi, Mathematics
  • Juergen Branke, Warwick Business School
  • Colm Connaughton, Mathematics
  • Martyn Plummer, Statistics
  • Christian Robert, Statistics

  • Clare Roberts, Warwick Business School
  • Long Tran-Thanh, Computer Science

We gratefully acknowledge the support from our sponsors.

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Register your interest

To register your interest or to find out more about how you can get involved, please contact dssg@wbs.ac.uk

Stay informed

Interested, but not ready yet?

Sign up to our DSSG mailing list to be notified about future opportunities.

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