“Data science for public managers” was the name of the workshop given by the director of GobLab UAI, at the University of Queensland.
Goblab and international academics dictate data science workshop in Australia
March 30, 2020
“Data science for public managers” was the name of the workshop given by the director of GobLab UAI, at the University of Queensland.
“We went to present the curriculum we created in 2019 in collaboration with the University of Chicago. The curriculum answers essential questions in the initial development of data science projects such as: What kind of public problems to solve with data? What are the minimum requirements for a data science project? ”, Explained María Paz Hermosilla, director of the GobLab.
Topics such as problem identification, project feasibility analysis, project methodology and ethical data management (privacy, transparency and fairness) were discussed in the workshop. The modality was a mixture of presentations, debates and exercises.
In addition to the workshops, two master classes were held with public managers. These instances were successful in both cities and a total of around 24 public institutions in Australia attended, including the Department of Education, Department of Childhood, Juvenile Justice, Natural Resources, Mining and Energy, Interior, Department of Transportation and the Department of Health.
The workshop was held in conjunction with two international speakers. One of them was Rhema Vaithianathan, professor at the University of Queensland and Auckland (New Zealand) and founder of the Center for Social Data Analysis. She is internationally recognized for implementing machine learning tools in highly sensitive government systems, such as the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, a predictive risk model for monitoring allegations of child abuse. The other speaker was Rayid Ghani, a professor in the Department of Machine Learning and in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, he was chief scientist for the Obama 2012 campaign in charge of analysis, technology and data.
GobLab’s director indicates that the experience “showed that the curriculum that we developed and tested in Chile, and that originates from the United States, can have a global impact and accelerate the adoption of data science for government projects and social”. This data science project formulation curriculum is available for free under a Creative Commons license, find out here.
