5. Solving Social Problems with Data Science

Isaac Slavitt is the co-founder of DrivenData, a platform for organizations to solicit help from data scientists to solve real-world problems. DrivenData does this by running "competitions" which asks teams to comb through data sets to solve problems for cash rewards.

One such competition was Zamba. Researchers set up cameras in African forests and asked engineering experts to develop AI software which could classify the types of animals which were captured. This would then help with research and conversation efforts without disturbing the natural ecosystem. Another such competition is DengAI, which seeks ML techniques to try and predict future outbreaks of dengue fever.

Isaac concludes the interview by talking about DrivenData's tech stack. He discusses the uses of both R and Python in the data scientist community. He notes that many computationally intensive task, such as ML classification and testing, are able to be offloaded to a service like Paperspace, while the majority of their platform runs on Heroku.

Links from this episode

1. DrivenData
2. Zamba
3. DengAI
4. Paperspace