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Sheila Jasanoff announced as Trust in Science Faculty Lead

October 28, 2020

The Harvard Data Science Initiative is pleased to announce the appointment of Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School, as Faculty Lead of the HDSI’s Trust in Science project.  Professor Jasanoff is a pioneer in the field of Science and Technology Studies and brings to her role decades of scholarship examining the role of science in society.  She is the author of more than 130 articles or book chapters and is editor or author of more than 15 books on related topics.... Read more about Sheila Jasanoff announced as Trust in Science Faculty Lead

A new gift to support the HDSI Postdoctoral Fellows

October 15, 2020

The Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) has received a generous $2 million gift from Susan Wojcicki AB ’90 and Dennis Troper to support the Harvard Data Science Initiative Postdoctoral Fellows program.

“The HDSI Postdoctoral Fellows are critical members of our data science ecosystem,” says David Parkes, George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and HDSI Faculty Co-Director. “They bring an important interdisciplinary lens to challenges...

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Dwork & Williams: Don’t Rush the Census

September 22, 2020

 

Curtailing the census enumeration period will destroy the quality of the data for a decade. With bad data, statistical analyses are useless, predictions are pointless. Bad data also threatens to cripple the development of data science, as algorithms trained on bad data will necessarily fail, obscuring information about the quality of the algorithms essential for improving the field. #DontRushtheCensus....

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An emergency response team for data?

September 19, 2020

Harvard Data Science Review airs COVID-19 findings

Data science has made key contributions in the battle against COVID-19, from tracking cases and deaths to understanding how populations move during travel restrictions to vaccine design. The Harvard Data Science Initiative is working to support faculty members, students, and fellows in designing and applying the tools of statistics and computer science and creating a community to foster the flow of ideas. The year-old Harvard Data Science Review published a...

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An Update on the HDSI's Efforts to Combat Racism and Bias

August 17, 2020

On June 23, 2020, the Harvard Data Science Initiative released an Anti-Racism Statement in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the outpouring of public anger their murders impelled.  In that Statement, we committed to “identify concrete ways in which we, as a Harvard data science community, can support research programs and education that expose bias in the way data and data science is used, as well as advance research into fair and responsible...

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Harvard Data Science Review Launches Issue 2:3

July 30, 2020

The latest issue of HDSR has just launched, and it contains a timely collection of 15 articles (6 forthcoming in August and September) that should inspire much discussion and debate. Editor-In-Chief Xiao-Li Meng appropriately sets the stage for the reader with his delightful editorial (complete with a recipe), “What is your List of 10 Challenges in Data Science?”  This issue truly embodies HDSR’s mantra, Everything Data Science and Data Science for Everyone, as it features a high school student, a comedian, and two presidents (one for a university and one for a professional society), among many others from industry and academia.
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Harvard Data Science Initiative Awarded Grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

July 29, 2020

The Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) has received a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support a team of Harvard faculty working on new methods for causal inference and machine learning.

“Existing causal inference methods largely address simple situations where the intervention is binary—for example, receiving treatment or not—and the observations are independent across time and space,” explains Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H....

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