Diversity in data science: Microsoft Research’s summer school aims high

Published March 24, 2015

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Data science offers the potential to revolutionize areas as disparate as commerce, healthcare, cybersecurity, and politics. To make progress in these areas, we must also make progress in computer science. Specifically, we at Microsoft Research believe that the best solution to a diverse set of problems is a diverse group of technically trained experts.

Cultivating such a broad base of expertise is at the heart of the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School (opens in new tab), an eight-week effort to introduce large-scale data analysis to undergraduate students in the New York City area that is committed to increasing diversity in computer science. The summer school therefore encourages applications from women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and students from smaller, resource-constrained colleges.

This year’s summer school will run from June 15, 2015 to August 7, 2015. Apply online (opens in new tab) for the 2015 summer school; please note that the application deadline is April 17.

All applicants must:

be currently enrolled at an NYC-area undergraduate program
have taken core undergraduate computer-science classes
have some programming experience
have a desire to attend graduate school

The school will choose eight upper-level NYC undergraduate students who come from race, gender, and socioeconomic groups that are traditionally under-represented in computer science, or whose schools resources don’t meet students’ demands. Our intent is to give these young women and men a head start in their computing careers.

Selected applicants will receive a laptop and a $5,000 stipend. More importantly, they will be introduced to the key tools and techniques for working with large data sets. The instruction will focus on how these tools can help solve actual problems, and will provide hands-on experience with real-world data, which is often far messier than the prepackaged data sets typically used in college courses.

The first four weeks of the summer school will introduce the students to practical tools for acquiring and interacting with data from online sources, methods from applied statistics for exploring data, and simple but effective tools from machine learning for modeling data. This will include scripting on the command line and statistical modeling in R. The course will contain a morning lecture and discussion followed by group and individual lab work in the afternoon.

The final four weeks will focus on two group research projects with mentor check-ins. Both groups will learn to apply technical tools to answer substantive scientific questions, and each will share its finding by producing a technical report, a demonstration, or both. These projects should serve as a key differentiator for graduate school applications and for those seeking research jobs, and a particularly successful project could lead to a scientific publication and/or recognition at a major conference. For example, last year’s summer school projects were accepted to the 2014 KDD Workshop on Data Science for Social Good (opens in new tab) and were recognized during the poster session at the 2015 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing (opens in new tab), the Association of Computing Machinery’s premier diversity event.

In addition to increasing diversity in computer science, the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School also fosters long-term interactions between Microsoft Research and talented young students from the New York City area.

Our over-arching goal is to get the students excited about computer science and to show them the creative, research side of the discipline, which they may not have encountered in their classes. In the process, we hope to prepare them for future careers in computer science.

—Jake Hofman & Justin Rao, Researchers, Microsoft Research New York City

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