Tag: Data Science Education

Using several open data sources, DataKind and the Black Wealth Data Center have started building a tool to facilitate the targeting of business capital investment into Black-owned businesses in underinvested localities.

The racial wealth gap and the gap in assets accrued by households between races is representative of, and interrelated with, many inequalities experienced between races: income, wealth, education opportunities, and housing. Successful business ownership is considered to be a key way to close the racial wealth gap. Expanding business capital investment opportunities including making fair loan application processes and providing other financial access, will increase the number and size of Black-owned businesses.

The tool combines open source indicators, identified through data science, to rank communities by need for investment, and it will be open for all to use. This means that groups including Community Development Financial Institutions (“CDFIs”) and Minority Depository Institutions (“MDIs”), government entities, and researchers will be able to not only use a data-driven tool but also cite the tool in grants and applications to show they are making data-driven decisions to target efforts. CDFIs serve the communities they work within, and have been a key component of increasing investment in Black businesses, but often as nonprofits themselves, they lack the time to focus on sophisticated targeting, advertising, and evaluation. This tool will allow them to use a sophisticated approach quickly and easily.

This event will be a presentation of the open data and indicators we have explored and determined are most useful in predicting underinvestment in the Black community. The tool can operate at several geographic levels including census tract, county, state, and nation; we will delve into the output for the NYC area during the event and show how NYC tracts compare to others across the state and nation. Attendees will have the opportunity to use the Tableau tool and share feedback.

Presto is an open-source SQL engine for querying and analyzing large data sets from multiple sources. In this session, you’ll use NYC Open Data to learn some basics of how to connect to any data source, query, and distribute data. Presto avoids the complexity and cost of ingesting and duplicating data to enable data-driven decision making. This can benefit organizations of any size, whether they are for-profit or not-for-profit, government or private, by enabling faster and more efficient utilization of data.

No prior experience is necessary!

The session will be led by Philip Bell, Developer Advocate from Meta Open Source. We will also discuss why you should use open source, principles for keeping data secure and private, and how to scale community efforts around data. Philip started his career in big data and cybersecurity in the Department of Defense and teaches introductory cybersecurity courses at a community college in addition to his role at Meta.

Note that this workshop is designed to take no longer than an hour, but attendees are welcome to take extra time to continue their work.

To attend in person at Meta’s Manhattan Office, pre-register at: https://forms.gle/JkaCxet5S7auhZVP7

To attend virtually, sign up at: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/2016789800745/WN_kL2wNewNStWf528Pz4Euog 

 

Open data is an invaluable resource for the public and researchers but making information about people publicly available comes with ethical concerns. For example, while NYC taxi pickup and dropoff data has been used for the good to map and understand NYC’s diverse communities, it’s also been used to identify and shame New Yorkers.

In the same vein, while the City Council’s move to make water consumption data publicly available may benefit certain businesses, this data unintentionally publicizes personal information about households, including real-time data indicating when a utility customer may be home or their daily life patterns.

In this presentation Gale Brewer, Adrienne Schmoeker, Eleni Manis, and Albert Fox Cahn will use New York City as the prime example to discuss the ethical risks of open data. After a discussion, the forum will open to attendees to propose and workshop solutions to eliminate these risks and make the most of open data.

Join us in person for an interactive workshop at Columbia University. Beginners are welcome!

Design thinking has transformed the way products and services are built, and influences many aspects of our lives. As artificial intelligence, analytics, and data become pervasive, data thinking is transforming how we make decisions, gather information about the world, and live our lives.

This workshop will begin with a presentation on the principles of data thinking, ranging from talking to the people affected by the data artifacts you create, visualizing early and often, using simple models before advanced AI, writing math before code, using open source, and making data-to-decision maps.

Next, we will empower the audience with tools such as ChatGPT and Google Colaboratory and in an interactive workshop explore a case study using NYC Open Data. Everyone in the audience will be able to download a dataset using prepared Jupyter notebooks, and we will walk them through a visualization.

After this simple illustration of the principles of data thinking, we will hold office hours where participants can immediately apply the skills they learned and analyze any dataset from NYC Open Data (or any other dataset of interest), and ai@columbia organizers from the Zuckerman Institute and the One Fact Foundation staff will be on hand to answer any questions and help transfer these skills.

Please email hello@onefact.org with any questions.

Event Materials: datathinking.org/nyc-open-data-week

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.

Want to learn more about Open Data? Looking for tips for using public datasets?

Join this introductory session for an overview of the history of data sharing in NYC; a tutorial on navigating, filtering, and visualizing datasets; and an exploration of some tools that make Open Data easier to use.

The session will be taught by a member of NYC’s Open Data Ambassadors, volunteers trained to share Open Data with their fellow New Yorkers. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC. To learn more, visit nyc.gov/discoveropendata.