Data Science for
Public Service
Blog Topics
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21
Jan, 2023
Read more → artificial-intelligence urban design-thinkingFuturists have long recognized the promise and disruptive potential of artificial intelligence, but there have been many false starts and AI has developed a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering. Success has been relegated to narrow domains like chess where the task is well-defined, rules are explicit, and the objective is clear. Even in these simplified environments the AI platforms have required teams of engineers working relentlessly to refine and optimize a system of algorithms tailored to the specific task to achieve a notable level of performance.
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15
Dec, 2021
Read more → spatial open-data urbanData scientists at the Urban Institute develop a methodology for identifying problematic landlords from public data sources.
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20
Nov, 2021
Read more → big-data privacy public-interest-tech predictive psychologyEver wonder how big data firms are using your social media data?
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10
Apr, 2021
Read more → open-data API public-interest-techNick Muerdter put his programming expertise to use to help communities get vaccinated.
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11
Mar, 2020
Read more → open-data data-viz open-scienceTim Churches, a Senior Research Fellow at the UNSW Medicine South Western Sydney Clinical School at Liverpool Hospital, and a health data scientist at the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research, has produced a nice tutorial on acquiring data and creating epidemiological models to understand the spread of the disease.
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7
Jan, 2020
Read more → open-data text-analysis twitterTwitter has kicked off the New Year by taking the wraps off a new hub for academic researchers to more easily access information and support around its APIs — saying the move is in response to feedback from the research community.
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20
Oct, 2019
Read more → open-data governmentFormer US Chief Data Scientist, DJ Patel, spoke on what makes technology radical and revolutionary. At a recent talk he gave some very compelling examples of public services improving when access to data improved:
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21
Sep, 2019
Read more → learning-curve big-data machine-learning governmentIan Foster, Rayid Ghani, Ron S. Jarmin, Frauke Kreuter and Julia Lane have released a free textbook on useful computational methods for social sciences:
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2
Jul, 2019
Read more → spatial maps gis data-vizOne of my pet peeves is the use of geographic polygon maps, such as state border shapefiles, to display population data as choropleth maps. Because the brain interprets polygon size as a signal of importance, they are often more misleading than they are insightful!
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21
Jun, 2019
Read more → police criminology performance-management biasAmazingly, the NBA has managed to succeed where many police forces have failed.
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10
Jun, 2019
Read more → epidemiology criminology demography health data-vizPaula Moraga has released an online book Geospatial Health Data: Modeling and Visualization with R-INLA and Shiny (under development), which describes spatial and spatio-temporal statistical methods and visualization techniques to analyze georeferenced health data in R.
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2
Jun, 2019
Read more → urban government open-data innovationIn a RECENT BLOG POST Sam Edelstein reflects on his time as the Chief Data Officer of the City of Syracuse:
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23
May, 2019
Read more → contest curriculumThe Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) has issued a call for white papers on Data Science Curriculum for Public Service.
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1
May, 2019
Read more → open-data censusIPUMS has created a GeoMarker tool to allow you to add demographic and community data to any address fields or latitude-longitude point data.
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23
Apr, 2019
Read more → r learning-curveGrosser & Bumann have created a project to help hone data science skills through better programming.
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20
Apr, 2019
Read more → r dplyr tidyverse data.table data-wranglingPreparing data for the analysis takes plenty of time and commonly is considered as one of the less favorite parts of any data science job. It is commonly stated that “data preparation accounts for about 80% of the work of data scientists”.
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16
Apr, 2019
Read more → r shiny contest data-viz“Shiny” is a package in R that allows users to create dynamic web applications. Typically these apps require advanced knowledge of several web programming languages, but Shiny allows the user to do all of the development in R, greatly simplifying the learning curve and development time.
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13
Apr, 2019
Read more → text-analysis LegiScan data-journalism open-dataIn ground-breaking investigative reporting, data journalist Rob O’Dell and USA Today have systematically tracked the diffusion of cut-and-paste legislation through state government. See:
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5
Apr, 2019
Read more → r plotly data-vizPlotly is one of the most popular R packages for creating interactive visualizations.
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24
Mar, 2019
Read more → open-data census gisHave you ever tried working with census data over time and encountered challenges with changes to Census tracts, which alter the units of analysis? Then you will appreciate these projects.
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20
Mar, 2019
Read more → open-data public-policy doiAndy Whitford at the University of Georgia wrote a blog on using DOI Codes to find data appropriate for scholarship in public affairs.
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14
Mar, 2019
Read more → big-data open-data bias policeThe Stanford Open Policing Project contains approximately 200 million data points on police stops in the US. The data are made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.
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11
Mar, 2019
Read more → data-viz government contestIn partnership with the World Government Summit and Information is Beautiful, the World Government Summit Data Viz Prize winners were announced. The prize focuses on how governments are improving citizens’ lives.
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10
Mar, 2019
Read more → urban spatial open-data predictive rKen Streif at Urban Spatial has introduced an interesting predictive model that cities can adopt to anticipate development intensity and gentrification patterns.
