The mission of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub is to build and strengthen partnerships. Great partnerships cannot rest on a foundation of inequality; they must work to advance equity and accessibility for all partners, of all backgrounds. That’s why building a diverse, equitable and inclusive community is central to the work of the Hub. The Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub is committed to advancing opportunities for those who have been underserved in the data science field, including from the perspective of racial and social equity and fairness, and for individuals with differing abilities.
As a mode of representation, data holds great power in individual and institutional decision-making. It both reveals disparities and needs within our communities and provides a path forward toward innovation and change. As a community of data science practitioners, we are committed to building diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of our work, always mindful to leverage the power of data responsibly, and to improve accessibility to data and insights. Our focus on Responsible Data Science serves as a foundation for enabling data science that is secure, private, and ethical.
We realize our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility through mutual collaboration, proactive outreach, and inclusivity by design. Our goal every day is to do better than we have done before.
Learn more below about some of our work to date and read our website accessibility statement.
DEIA and Data Science Resources
Race + Data Science Lecture Series
The Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University hosts the Race + Data Science Lecture Series at regular intervals. This lecture series aims to celebrate and advance research in the areas of race and data, engineering, and computational science.
With this series of events, the DSI’s goal is to improve how we as data scientists and data-adjacent researchers speak about race. Through wide distribution of our speaker’s research, we envision that these talks can lead to the discovery of important resources about race, inequity, and emerging applications. This series is funded by support from the MacArthur Foundation and New America.
The People’s Speech Dataset
The People’s Speech Dataset is among the world’s largest English speech recognition corpus today that is licensed for academic and commercial usage under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY 4.0. It includes 30,000+ hours of transcribed speech in English languages with a diverse set of speakers. This open dataset is large enough to train speech-to-text systems and crucially is available with a permissive license. Just as ImageNet catalyzed machine learning for vision, the People’s Speech will unleash innovation in speech research and products that are available to users across the globe.
10 Women Who Pioneered the Tech Industry
Women programmed the very first computer, wrote the code that landed men on the moon, and came up with the idea for computer programs a century before the invention of computers. Thanks to the barrier-breaking work of women like Annie Easley, Carol Shaw, and Margaret Hamilton, today women work in every sector of the tech industry.
March 2022 Women in STEM Campaign
In honor of Women’s History Month, the NEBD Hub and the National Student Data Corps (NSDC) launched a month-long program in March 2022 called the Women in STEM campaign. This campaign leveraged social media and the NEBD Hub’s newsletters to share resources, opportunities, and information about how women can establish a successful career in data science. This campaign culminated with the March NSDC Career Panel, held on Friday, March 25th.
Let’s Teach Computer Science Majors to Be Good Citizens. The Whole World Depends on It.
Minority Serving Institutions: America’s Underutilized Resource for Strengthening the STEM Workforce
Equity-Centered Leadership and Communication Brief, National Science Foundation (NSF)
Upcoming DEIA and Data Science Events
iCubed Seminar: Paul Ardis, GE
DEIA and Data Science Professional Opportunities
2022 Data Science Internship Program, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center
Accepting rolling applications
Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC)
Stage 1 Deadline – May 5th
Stage 2 Deadline – February 1
Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)
Phase I Deadline – May 12th
Phase II Deadline – October 21st
DEIA and Data Science Career Opportunities
Additional DEIA Career Resources can be found on the National Student Data Corps (NSDC) Career Central page.
DEIA Success Stories
Pala Students Win ‘Best New Team’ Award at 2022 DataJam
Supercomputers can complete tasks so impressive that they have outpaced science fiction movies. However, they do more than that, they can provide inspiration to the next generation of scientists. One supercomputing center inspiring youth is the San Diego Supercomputer Center, or SDSC, at the University of California San Diego, which provides high-performance supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure resources […]
Curricular Structures to Blend Data Science & the Digital Humanities
Guest post by Amanda Greene, Lehigh University This Success Story is a report on the results of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s 2020 Seed Fund program. The goal of this project was to develop pedagogical resources that integrate humanist perspectives, ethics, and data science by supporting a collaborative working group of academics and industry […]
Using Data Science To Study Environmental Racism, Justice, And Policy
Guest post by Aunshul Rege, Temple University This Success Story is a report on the results of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s 2020 Seed Fund program. This project examined environmental injustice using a qualitative criminological lens. The project surveyed known case studies of environmental injustice in the United States to identify and rank harms […]