Attending Open Data Science East
One of the best things about working at MAPC is they support professional development by funding conference attendance. Attending conferences is important to professional development for technologists because it gives us an opportunity to step back and learn about what our peers are most excited about. It also is an opportunity to connect with people that do similar work to us and get new ideas for projects. Last week I spent two days at Open Data Science East in Boston and it gave me a lot to think about.
The best talk of the day was the keynote by Catherine O’Neil, author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction. O’Neil laid out the challenges and problems that machine learning algorithms are creating when they are used for predictive policing and recidivism. Her main point was that math can obfuscate the opinions and viewpoints held by those using it. At MAPC we use algorithms in our work for projects like Youth Match, but acknowledge that our algorithms will have a bias. By bringing young people into the design of the algorithm we developed something that worked best for them.
Another area of research that stood out was the use of machine vision algorithms. I attended a session where the speaker used satellite images and machine vision to identify different kinds of buildings in the images. This sort of technique could be useful for MAPC projects like Perfect Fit Parking and MassBuilds. Unfortunately the larger challenge with this sort of technology tends to be getting access to the raw valuable data. MAPC does not yet have its own satellite to image the Boston metro region, but maybe one day it will rent space or work with another group that can provide daily imaging.
When I attend a conference I keep an open mind and attend sessions that will show me new possibilities for our work. New tools and techniques may not be useful right away, but it is helpful to get a sense of the technical landscape. By seeing what tools and technologies are popular I can better recommend what the rest of my team should explore and we can build better things for the citizens of the commonwealth.
