How Can We Use Data for Social Good?

Data mining increasingly drives our lives: what movies we watch, what products we buy, and who we are friends with. Scientists work with data to build tools that help us make decisions in our lives. Much of their efforts focus on making us more comfortable, but we can also use data to solve big problems.

How can we use data for social good?

As human rights organizations confront the need to understand and analyze vast amounts of data, they must ask how data can foster and grow more open societies. Organizations like DataKind—a community of pioneering data scientists and social innovators—help NGOs use data to change the world.

Speaker

Jake Porway is a data scientist and the founder and executive director of DataKind. A machine-learning and technology enthusiast who loves nothing more than seeing good values in data, Porway founded DataKind in the hopes of creating a world in which every social organization has access to data capacity to better serve humanity. He was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community. He holds a BS in computer science from Columbia University and his MS and PhD in statistics from UCLA.