A summer of data hacking social problems

The idea, Rayid Ghani recalled, grew out of his experience speaking to computer science students at elite schools like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and the University of Chicago. US President Barack Obama had just won his re-election bid last fall. And Ghani, chief scientist for the campaign, was on a kind of explanatory victory tour, describing how cutting-edge data analysis and computing tools gave its side an edge.

For Ghani, the Obama campaign demonstrated how those tools could be used to influence people in fields beyond the well-known commercial ones, like search, social networks and online advertising. And beyond politics, he would tell the students, were a host of social challenges in health care, education and urban development where their skills could be put to good use, working with nonprofits, civic groups and local governments.

The students, Ghani said, seemed mostly unaware of the opportunity for such social applications. "So much of the computing agenda today is motivated by the problems that the big internet companies face," he observed. "But if all these kids are doing that, they are not working on the things that really matter."

So Ghani created the Data Science for Social Good fellowship programme at the University of Chicago, which began in June, and gives aspiring young data scientists a chance to tackle real-world social problems. The programme owes its existence to a private pool of wealth created by an internet giant. It is financed by the Schmidt Family Foundation, an educational charity led by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and his wife, Wendy.

In March, Ghani joined the University of Chicago, where he is a research scientist at both the Harris School of Public Policy and the Computation Institute. That month, he made a trip to Silicon Valley and visited Schmidt, whom he had worked with on the Obama campaign. Ghani described his idea for a summer fellowship programme. Impressed, Schmidt urged Ghani to move quickly and do it for this summer.

In an email, Schmidt explained that he spent a lot of time in Chicago for the Obama campaign, and he grew fond of the city and admired the University of Chicago. "This is a small way to help that might have a bigger impact than we think," he wrote.

Urban social problems are a fresh challenge for sophisticated data tools. Regardless of what the students eventually do, the summer, Schmidt wrote, will be a valuable experience. "Almost all the interesting jobs will be related to Big Data in the future."

©2013 The New York Times News Service