Online Program

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Friday, May 18
Computing Science
Big Data and Data Science in Government, Public Policy, and the Health Sciences
Fri, May 18, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Grand Ballroom D
 

Building Resilient Communities: Harnessing the Power of Data (304291)

Presentation

*Sallie Keller, Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech 

Keywords: Community Learning Data Driven Discovery, Statistical Learning, Geospatial Learning, Administrative Data, Designed Data, Opportunity Data, Evaluation, Vulnerable Populations

Imagine waking up in 25 years, what sort of community will you be living in? More importantly, in 25 years, what sort of community do you want to be living in? City and county municipal governments want to be responsive to their residents, improve their quality of life, determine what services are needed, and to stimulate economic growth. During the course of administering public services and allocating resources, an abundance of data is generated. The story of the community is in these data. Every community has a unique phenotype, a set of characteristics that are influenced by its environment and drive its evolutionary trajectory. This presentation will share how we are fostering connections within the community to identify these unique characteristics with a focus on how to repurpose the various municipal and external data sources to support the community through data informed policy development.

We call our approach Community Learning Data Driven Discovery (CLD3). The CLD3 process starts with asking local leaders what their questions are but cannot currently answer; identifying data sources that can provide insights; wrangling the data (profiling, cleaning, transforming, linking); using statistical and geospatial learning along with the communities’ collective knowledge to inform policy decisions; and developing, deploying, and evaluating intervention strategies based on scientifically based principles. CLD3 is a continuous, sustainable, and controlled feedback loop. Working with community leaders through the CLD3 process can build capacity at the local-levels for data-driven governance and evidence-based policy development. Examples from the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory in the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech will be discussed. A model for scaling the process across the country through partnerships with Land Grant Universities and Cooperative Extension will be given.