ABSTRACT
Data science has had a tremendous impact in the private sector and is increasingly being applied in the public sector. The Data for Good Exchange (D4GX) is an annual conference centered on these novel problems and applications. This article describes the history of the conference and introduces a selection of the best papers from the 2017 conference that focus on human services.
Acknowledgements
Over the past 4 years, there have been a tremendous number of people who made this event possible. This includes a whole host of people organizing and facilitating it from inside of Bloomberg, where the event has been hosted. In addition, we’ve had a Program Committee of 20–30 people each year that perform peer review of all submitted papers. Of course, the conference has also relied on the participation of many institutions, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and UNICEF. Truly, this special issue would not exist without any of them.