Bayes Impact, the big data-focused nonprofit organization, is launching Bayes Impact University Program at five pilot universities this fall. The idea is to give master’s students opportunities to solve real-world problems using big data.

The University of California, Berkeley, Duke University; New York University; Northwestern University; and the University of San Francisco are participating.

The program is a novel way to match great talent with practical challenges, which makes sense given that the demand for data scientists exceeds the supply, and given that as training programs proliferate, more realistic training can amount to a differentiator. The Science to Data Science program in London, for instance, also focuses on solving practical problems as it trains up Ph.Ds and scientists. But Bayes Impact’s focus on social problems gives the program a special twist.

“Generally what happens with most master programs is, in the last year, they have capstone programs, where they apply their skills to a real project, or a manufactured project,” said Jiang. “What we provide them is instead of doing a project for, let’s say, Yelp, or Twitter, they are doing a project for Red Cross, or a project with another nonprofit or civic organization.”

Students in the program will work in teams of two to four on a single project for six to 10 months. Past projects range from “developing fraud detection and credit risk models for micro-finance nonprofits” to “identifying predictive indicators and biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease.”

Bayes Impact also provides students with strong mentorship from data science industry veterans and faculty mentors within the universities. For example, Bayes Impact looks for data scientists from the Research Triangle in North Carolina to mentor students at Duke University.

And these two groups of mentors complement each other, from Jiang’s perspective. Industry people provide students with practical skills and solutions. Professors bring domain expertise in addition to their data science experience, especially when it comes to health care and education.

Source: venturebeat.com