Title: Data Science for Social Good

 

The Data Science Institute at UBC has offered the Data Science for Social Good program for the past 6 years.

This 14-week, full-time program is designed to promote diversity by bringing together undergraduate students and graduate students from diverse backgrounds with experience in data science, urban research and planning, social sciences, and other domains to work on collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects that have the potential to benefit society. These projects—submitted by non-profit organizations such as local municipal governments—provide students with hands-on, end-to-end training and an opportunity to understand the social implications and the ethics related to the use of public and private data.  The program also brings in outside organizations, such as Microsoft Vancouver and Boeing Canada, to provide career mentoring for the students. We will give a quick overview on some of the projects in previous years. 

 

Biography

Raymond Ng is the Canada Research Chair on data science and analytics. He is also the founding Director of the Data Science Institute at the University of British Columbia, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was named as one of the world’s top-75 “Academic Data Science Leaders 2022” by the Chief Data Officer Magazine which grew out of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Ng’s main research area for the past three decades is on data mining, with a specific focus on health informatics and text mining. He has published over 220 peer-reviewed publications on data clustering, outlier detection, OLAP processing, health informatics and text mining. He is the recipient of two best paper awards – from the 2001 ACM SIGKDD conference, the premier data mining conference in the world, and the 2005 ACM SIGMOD conference, one of the top database conferences worldwide. On curriculum development, Ng co-founded the highly popular Master of Data Science professional degree at UBC.