Bloomberg Hosts Fifth Annual Data for Good Exchange

Conference will address real-world challenges in accessing and utilizing data for social change

New York: Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange 2018 will be held at Bloomberg’s Global Headquarters in New York City on Sunday, September 16, 2018. Now in its fifth year, the event offers a venue for participants from across academia, industry, government and NGOs to share insights and report on progress related to applying modern machine learning and data science methods to improve civic and social outcomes through workshops, paper presentations, panels and keynotes.

This year’s conference theme – “Our Data for Good?” – looks at how data scientists, corporations, policy makers and researchers to collaborate on data science projects that result in positive social outcomes, while ensuring that the data science being practiced focuses on everyone having a stake, making it solid, fair, and equitable.

The event will begin with a keynote address by Rose Gill Hearn, principal at Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consulting service established by Michael Bloomberg following his mayoralty in New York City. She will highlight real-world examples of how data scientists are collaborating with city governments around the globe to make their agencies more efficient and responsive to their citizens and businesses.

For the first time since its inception, Data for Good Exchange 2018 will also feature interactive workshops where leading data scientists will collaborate with attendees to explore a set of real-world problems to be addressed. The projects are all aimed at creating social change through data. The four workshops at this year’s event include:

• An Ethics and Algorithms Toolkit for Government (and anyone else!) – A team led by Andrew Nicklin, Director of Data Practices at the Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) at Johns Hopkins University, will present a toolkit designed to help governments find and detect bias in their data-driven initiatives. The workshop will give participants the tools to evaluate and mitigate different types of bias in data-driven initiatives.
• Data for Good 2025: Building the Data Science Ecosystem We Need for Tomorrow, Today – Jake Porway, Founder of DataKind, will dive into how to effectively drive collaboration between different sectors – private, government, not-for-profit, and academia – in the data for good movement.
• Addressing Community Challenges with Data-Driven Solutions – Catherine Cramer, Manager of Industry Engagement at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, joins Stephen Miles Uzzo, Chief Scientist of the New York Hall of Science, to explore how data can be used to help communities of need. The real-world problems to be addressed are centered on the community of Corona, Queens, whose inhabitants include many first-generation immigrants who frequently speak English as a second language and earn less than the federal poverty guidelines.
• Census 2020: Census Data & the Media – Led by NYC Media Lab’s Justin Hendrix, Prof. Mark Hansen, director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia’s Journalism School, and Mara Abrams, managing director of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Census Open Innovation Labs, this workshop will examine how media can help increase census response rates.

Armed with large data sets – and the skills to analyze them – data scientists are well-positioned to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. For the past five years, the Data for Good Exchange conference has offered data scientists a forum to share ideas and methods for using data science and human capital to solve novel problems at the core of society.

“Bloomberg is an organization that truly recognizes the value of data, both in analyzing the global capital markets and facilitating social change, while data scientists are inherently focused on using their unique skillset to solve problems,” said Gideon Mann, Head of Data Science in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg. “As part of our ongoing efforts to drive impactful change in local and global communities, the Data for Good Exchange is facilitating meaningful conversations about how we can use data to drive positive change – to focus attention on problems that might not be addressed by market forces, for problems in government or the public sector, for people who do not hold significant market power, or for problems that might otherwise be ignored by the market.”

Find out more about the event at https://www.bloomberg.com/company/d4gx/. You can follow or participate in the Data for Good Exchange 2018 conversation using #D4GX on Twitter.

About Bloomberg
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