Data Science for Social Good


Book Description

This book is a collection of reflections by thought leaders at first-mover organizations in the exploding field of "Data Science for Social Good", meant as the application of knowledge from computer science, complex systems and computational social science to challenges such as humanitarian response, public health, sustainable development. The book provides both an overview of scientific approaches to social impact – identifying a social need, targeting an intervention, measuring impact – and the complementary perspective of funders and philanthropies that are pushing forward this new sector. This book will appeal to students and researchers in the rapidly growing field of data science for social impact, to data scientists at companies whose data could be used to generate more public value, and to decision makers at nonprofits, foundations, and agencies that are designing their own agenda around data.




Science and the Social Good


Book Description

Using biographies of three natural scientists--geologist Clarence King, forester Robert Marshall, and biologist Rachel Carson--Science and the Social Good investigates the links between nature's scientific study and social improvement.




Social Physics


Book Description

A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.




Artificial Intelligence and Conservation


Book Description

With the increasing public interest in artificial intelligence (AI), there is also increasing interest in learning about the benefits that AI can deliver to society. This book focuses on research advances in AI that benefit the conservation of wildlife, forests, coral reefs, rivers, and other natural resources. It presents how the joint efforts of researchers in computer science, ecology, economics, and psychology help address the goals of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Written at a level accessible to conservation professionals and AI researchers, the book offers both an overview of the field and an in-depth view of how AI is being used to understand patterns in wildlife poaching and enhance patrol efforts in response, covering research advances, field tests and real-world deployments. The book also features efforts in other major conservation directions, including protecting natural resources, ecosystem monitoring, and bio-invasion management through the use of game theory, machine learning, and optimization.




Artificial Intelligence and Social Work


Book Description

An introductory guide with real-life examples on using AI to help homeless youth, diabetes patients, and other social welfare interventions.




Social Science for What?


Book Description

How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.




Operations Management for Social Good


Book Description

This volume showcases the presentations and discussions delivered at the 2018 POMS International Conference in Rio. Through a collection of selected papers, it is possible to review the impact and application of operations management for social good, with contributions across a wide range of topics, including: humanitarian operations and crisis management, healthcare operations management, sustainable operations, artificial intelligence and data analytics in operations, product innovation and technology in operations management, marketing and operations management, service operations and servitization, logistics and supply chain management, resilience and risk in operations, defense, and tourism among other emerging Operations Management issues. The Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) is one of the most important and influential societies in the subject of Production Engineering and, as an international professional and academic organization, represents the interests of professionals and academics in production management and operations around the world.




Lean Impact


Book Description

Despite enormous investments of time and money, are we making a dent on the social and environmental challenges of our time? What if we could exponentially increase our impact? Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices, popularized by bestseller The Lean Startup, that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal - radically greater social good. Social change is far more complicated than building a new app. It requires more listening, more care, and more stakeholders. To make a lasting difference, solutions must be embraced by beneficiaries, address root causes, and include an engine that can accelerate growth to reach the scale of the need. Lean Impact offers bold ideas to reach audacious goals through customer insight, rapid experimentation and iteration, and a relentless pursuit of impact. Ann Mei Chang brings a unique perspective from across sectors, from her years as a tech executive in Silicon Valley to her most recent experience as the Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. She vividly illustrates the book with real stories from interviews with over 200 organizations across the US and around the world. Whether you are a nonprofit, social enterprise, triple bottom line company, foundation, government agency, philanthropist, impact investor, or simply donate your time and money, Lean Impact is an essential guide to maximizing social impact and scale.




Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases


Book Description

This two-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the workshops which complemented the 19th Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD, held in Würzburg, Germany, in September 2019. The 70 full papers and 46 short papers presented in the two-volume set were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The two volumes (CCIS 1167 and CCIS 1168) present the papers that have been accepted for the following workshops: Workshop on Automating Data Science, ADS 2019; Workshop on Advances in Interpretable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence and eXplainable Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining, AIMLAI-XKDD 2019; Workshop on Decentralized Machine Learning at the Edge, DMLE 2019; Workshop on Advances in Managing and Mining Large Evolving Graphs, LEG 2019; Workshop on Data and Machine Learning Advances with Multiple Views; Workshop on New Trends in Representation Learning with Knowledge Graphs; Workshop on Data Science for Social Good, SoGood 2019; Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and User Modelling for Smart Cities, UMCIT 2019; Workshop on Data Integration and Applications Workshop, DINA 2019; Workshop on Machine Learning for Cybersecurity, MLCS 2019; Workshop on Sports Analytics: Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, MLSA 2019; Workshop on Categorising Different Types of Online Harassment Languages in Social Media; Workshop on IoT Stream for Data Driven Predictive Maintenance, IoTStream 2019; Workshop on Machine Learning and Music, MML 2019; Workshop on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering, BioASQ 2019. The chapter "Supervised Human-guided Data Exploration" is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).




Social Sensing


Book Description

Increasingly, human beings are sensors engaging directly with the mobile Internet. Individuals can now share real-time experiences at an unprecedented scale. Social Sensing: Building Reliable Systems on Unreliable Data looks at recent advances in the emerging field of social sensing, emphasizing the key problem faced by application designers: how to extract reliable information from data collected from largely unknown and possibly unreliable sources. The book explains how a myriad of societal applications can be derived from this massive amount of data collected and shared by average individuals. The title offers theoretical foundations to support emerging data-driven cyber-physical applications and touches on key issues such as privacy. The authors present solutions based on recent research and novel ideas that leverage techniques from cyber-physical systems, sensor networks, machine learning, data mining, and information fusion. Offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective bridging social networks, big data, cyber-physical systems, and reliability Presents novel theoretical foundations for assured social sensing and modeling humans as sensors Includes case studies and application examples based on real data sets Supplemental material includes sample datasets and fact-finding software that implements the main algorithms described in the book