Semester Research Project in Data Science for Social Impact

Catalog description

Students will perform a semester-long reproducible research data science project on a topic relevant to social impact. Students will present advances of their project as they go through the traditional steps of implementing a data science project within an ethical framework outlined in the appendix. Lectures will address social stewardship in data science for social impact, including confidentiality, ethics, unequal impact, bias awareness and algorithmic fairness. Students will apply these concepts at each step of their research project. They will share progress of their research project at intermediate stages of the process and engage in constructive peer feedback in the classroom. Lectures will review the basic elements of data science and analytics using R Project open source software. R is an open-source software project with broad abilities to access machine-readable open- data resources, data cleaning and assembly functions, and a rich selection of statistical packages, used for data analytics, model development, prediction, inference and visualization. This is a second year class for students pursuing a Certificate in Data Science for Social Impact (DSSI). As such, this class will ground the knowledge and practice acquired through the certificate program on a specific data science project for social impact. Prereq: SASS 471 and DSCI 451 .