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.
Find NEBDHub DEIA resources:
- Website Accessibility Statement
- Events and Slack Channel Code of Conduct
- Spanish Language Resources
- Data Science Career Central Resources
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)
American Chemical Society Inclusivity Style Guide
Research has shown that stereotyped language can do harm. In contrast, more inclusive language can create positive change (for example, more gender-neutral language can reduce bias). Inclusive language and images make content more accurate and ensure that it finds the widest possible audience. This writing style guide from the American Chemical Society (ACS) can be used by STEM researchers and administrators for improving the inclusivity features of online communications.
NSF Report: Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities
A diverse workforce provides the potential for innovation by leveraging different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view. Innovation and creativity, along with technical skills relying on expertise in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), contribute to a robust STEM enterprise. Furthermore, STEM workers have higher median earnings and lower rates of unemployment compared with non-STEM workers. This report provides high-level insights from multiple data sources into the diversity of the STEM workforce in the United States.
Upcoming DEIA and Data Science Events
DEIA and Data Science Professional Opportunities
2022 Data Science Internship Program, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center
Accepting rolling applications
2023-24 New Frontiers Graduate Fellowships
Applications due March 6th.
Accelerating the Pace of Child Health Research Using Existing Data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (R01-Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
Applications accepted on a rolling basis through February 5, 2025.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Conference Grant Programs
Applications accepted on a rolling basis through November 2026.
Call for Letters of Inquiry: Institutional Support for Open Source Software in Research
Letters of Inquiry are due February 15th
EHR Core Research: Building Capacity in STEM Education Research
Submissions due February 24th.
Emerging Viral Infections and their Impact on the Male and Female Reproductive Tract
Applications accepted through July 16, 2023
Inter-University Big Data Challenge (IUBDC)
Team submissions due May 23rd
Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Neurological and Neurocognitive Sequelae from SARS-CoV-2 Infection and COVID-19 in Aging and Age-Related Neurodegeneration
Applications accepted through May 8, 2023
Notice of Special Interest: Administrative Supplements for COVID-19 Impacted NIMH Research
Applications accepted through June 2, 2023
PEPI-G Program: Fellowships with Industry and Government
Applications accepted on a rolling basis.
Secondary Analyses of Existing Datasets of Tobacco Use and Health
Applications due March 8, 2023.
UW Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Student Fellow
Applications due February 13th.
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
Forecasting Salinity in Rivers during Storm Events
Guest post by Laura Dietz, University of New Hampshire This Success Story is a report on the results of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s 2020 Seed Fund program. Every winter, vast amounts of road salts are scattered onto streets across the northeastern U.S.. While important for our safety, ice-melt and rainfall wash this road […]
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 […]