10 August 2023
The Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) fellowship started. For two months, two teams of 4-5 fellows from across the world will work on two data science projects that have a social impact. The program is hosted by the department of statistics at LMU Munich of Frauke Kreuter and the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).
The Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) fellowship started. For two months, two teams of 4-5 fellows from across the world will work on two data science projects that have a social impact. The program is hosted by the department of statistics at LMU Munich of Frauke Kreuter and the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML). Many organizations that have a primary public mission, such as educational institutions, municipal or national governments, and NGOs, are not yet at the same level as corporations in utilizing data science. This disparity can be attributed to various factors, including limited financial resources or investment in this area, and lack in data science expertise. Data Science for Social Good in one organization to reverse this. The initiative was founded at the University of Chicago in 2013 with the mission to create and sustain programs, solutions and communities that enhance the use of data science and AI for social good. From the very beginning, the flagship project of DSSG has been its annual fellowship program, where aspiring data scientists can sharpen their skills in machine learning and data science while working on real problems for the social good. Through the collaboration of the department of statistics at LMU Munich and the MCML the DSSG fellowship program was brought to Munich – as DSSGx. The teams will work on the following topics:
Project 1: The civil protection/fire brigade currently does not have a good tool that shows the range of fire hydrants on a map and takes natural obstacles such as stairs, rails, buildings, etc. into account. The solution is the development of a Fire Hydrant Range-Finder Web App. This project is together with the Katastrophenschutz in Munich.
Project 2: The European Commission stated the target of reducing land consumption by 2050. Germany aims to limit its land-take to less than 30 ha/day by 2030. In this project, the fellows will use web/document scraping to produce a dataset about land parcels from districts across Germany to get information about land sealing. After, the fellows will be able to analyze the data and answer questions about climate-change and climate-resilience in these regions.
If you want to find out more about DSSGx in Munich: https://sites.google.com/view/dssgx-munich-2023/startseite