PROGRAM
We bring together talented UMass Amherst students, professional data scientists, and leading researchers to tackle challenging data science and artificial intelligence problems for the common good. DS4CG teams work with nonprofit partners on a wide variety of projects related to data ingestion, cleaning, modeling, visualization, and application development.
Our projects are anchored by a 12-week paid summer internship program in which UMass Amherst CICS undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD students work with the center’s full time data scientists and affiliated faculty to deliver innovative data and AI solutions that help make the world a better place.
Partners
DS4CG partners with nonprofits, public-sector organizations, and mission-aligned academics to accelerate end-to-end solutions to common good data science and artificial intelligence problems.
There is no fee to participate! DS4CG is funded by the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, our industry affiliate partners, and our generous donors.
Potential project partners are highly encouraged to reach out to explore ideas and opportunities at any stage of development.
Participants
Current UMass Amherst PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate CICS students studying data science or computer science are encouraged to apply.
Students develop skills in data analysis, visualization, and application development in our paid internship program.
Project work is complemented by a range of summer seminars that expand student perspectives on ethics, diversity, and the power of data and AI.
Explore Recent DS4CG Projects
Improving Media Analysis and Research by Developing a Model Training Pipeline
Media Cloud is an open-source platform for media analysis and research. Users can query the online news archive to investigate media attention and language. To
Analyzing Drone-Captured Images of African Elephants
Save the Elephants is an organization that works to secure a future for elephants. This team is working with Save the Elephants to analyze drone-captured images
Identifying Patterns in Unity’s GPU Usage
The Unity Research Computing Platform accelerates research from laptop-size to 1,000’s of cores and 100’s of graphics processing units (GPUs), and it has about 1400
Analyzing Political News Framing: A Dashboard for Cross-Spectrum News Insights
Media Cloud, an open-source media analysis platform, leveraged DS4CG students’ NPL expertise to improve ways to explore how media is reported and framed, supporting media literacy and critical analysis.
iNaturalist GeoModel Annotation Tool
The DS4CG team collaborated with iNaturalist to enhance geomodels that predict species’ geographic ranges, making them more accessible for biologists, ecologists, and citizen scientists.
Generating Metrics for High-Performance Computing Clusters
Partner: Unity DS4CG 2023. Unity is a collaborative, multi-institutional high-performance computing cluster, primarily used for research computing. The Unity project focused on generating useful metrics
Detecting Extreme Speech in YouTube Videos
Partner: Media Cloud The surge in multimodal content shared online, particularly on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, has increased the need for effective extreme and
Extracting Bylines from Media in Multiple Languages
Partner: Media Cloud Over the past few decades, the rapid expansion of digital media has transformed how information is shared and consumed. However, this growth
Analyzing Energy Usage with Predictive Modeling
Partner: Massachusetts Division of Capital Asset Management & Maintenance DS4CG 2023. DCAMM is responsible for managing resources in various state buildings like state hospitals, prisons,