With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility: How Data Science Can Be Applied to Solve Public Interest Problems Without Losing Its Soul

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Data science
• machine learning
• open data
• public sector

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.