Emergency Data Science

Taking Advantage of the Data Flood

December 4 - 5, 2018 8:30AM - 5:00PM | Toronto

ABOUT

An International Workshop on Building Humanitarian Decision-Making Tools in the Age of Big Data

This workshop is an invite-only event hosted by the newly created Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research (DIGHR) and the Lassonde School of Engineering (LSE) at York University. It brings together leading humanitarian agencies, data scientists, and developers from around the world to collaborate on urgent data-related challenges in humanitarian response.

Read more about the workshop here.



Challenges

Humanitarian responders are producing or have access to ever more data in our operational sphere. The question we now face is how can we use this data to improve decision-making in humanitarian response?

Together with our invited partners, we have identified five key challenges faced by these organizations that will be addressed during the workshop:



WHO IS COMING?

The event brings together participants from five key groups needed to solve complex humanitarian data science challenges: Humanitarian Field & Subject Matter Experts, Humanitarian Innovation Specialists, Data and Computer Science Researchers, Designers & Engineers, Data Ethicists & Governance Specialists.

Click here to see the full list of participants.



Agenda

Day 1 | December 4, 2018
Day 1 is the plenary session. An invited specialist will deliver a session on user-driven development of custom software solutions that will set the stage for the workshop. An invited speaker will discuss cross-cutting issues related to the ethics, privacy, security, and governance of data-driven solutions in humanitarian response. Humanitarian organizations will present their specific field-driven data challenges, and innovation specialists will present recent humanitarian data science applications in order to share lessons learned for future work.

Day 2 | December 5, 2018
Day 2 is the closed working group session. We have carefully assigned individuals to form five working groups around each of the specific field-driven data challenges. Groups will collaboratively generate high-level concepts and business plans for solutions. Strengths, weaknesses, and next steps for each solution will be discussed in the plenary group. (Selected participants only).

Click here for the detailed agenda.