PROGRAM
We bring together talented students, professional data scientists, and leading researchers to tackle challenging data science 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 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 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.
Explore Recent DS4CG Projects
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 DS4CG 2023. With the current surge in multimodal media shared online, particularly from platforms like YouTube and Instagram, the need for multimodal
Extracting Bylines from Media in Multiple Languages
Partner: Media Cloud DS4CG 2023. In an increasingly digital landscape for media across the globe, the need for content moderation, misinformation detection, and bias analysis
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,
Analysis of #StopAsianHate on Twitter
Partner: Co-Insights DS4CG 2023. This project takes a longitudinal approach to analyzing the #StopAsianHate hashtag on Twitter in order to understand changes in hashtag usage.
Tracking Bird Migration Patterns with Machine Learning
Partner: Environment Canada DS4CG 2023. Aerial insectivore populations have been declining in Canada, prompting the need for a model that can predict bird migration patterns.
Integrating DISCount for Disaster Relief
Partner: Red Cross Netherlands DS4CG 2023. The focus of the second summer of our partnership with the Red Cross was to integrate DISCount, UMass Computer
Red Cross: Satellite Imagery for Disaster Assessment
Timely reliable damage assessment of buildings and infrastructure in the wake of natural disasters is crucial for organized response and recovery efforts. To aid this effort, this project leverages modern machine learning techniques to rapidly analyze the before and after satellite images of affected areas to assess damage.
Save the Whales
When whales are encountered near the surface of the ocean, it’s useful to be able to quickly assess their health for conservation and evaluation purposes. As part of our Data Science for the Common Good program, Master’s students Chhandak Bagchi and Gizem Cicekli developed a tool for identifying a whale from an aerial image.