Student blog post: Applied Analytics and Open Data
Cory Winiecki, a third-year applied analytics student in the Department of Social Sciences, recently shared his thoughts on a blog post from the White House about progress made with this last year’s open data initiatives and goals for the coming year.
Earlier this month, a White House report stated that the information we, the public, need to make crucial life choices is being provided to us like never before. This is largely a function of President Obama’s focus on U.S. Government-provided open data and arguments that greater information flows will contribute to “innovation and scientific discovery” as well as produce “a more efficient, transparent, and collaborative democracy.” This is not necessarily news to those that have been accessing this sort of data through traditional channels like data search portals or Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIAs), and one might argue that it is overdue, as open data campaigns have been around for several years elsewhere, such as Chicago’s data portal.
The White House report provides links to memorandums, directives, and executive orders which have supported the open data focus, and the White House-produced Project Open Data breaks the entire initiative down into all of its constituent parts. The report also highlights “open data milestones and successes” for 2015: the U.S.’s first-ever Chief Data Scientist (DJ Patil), the appointment of Chief Data Officers and Chief Data Scientists at a number of Federal Agencies, specific tools and datasets that were made available to the public, tools for assessing governmental websites effectiveness, and the support of hackathons and data jams.
At Illinois Tech, the undergraduate degree in applied analytics dovetails extremely well with Project Open Data. As the report states, it does take a village to study such an expanse of data, and students in the applied analytics major are taught exactly what it means to work as a team. Indeed, sometimes such collaborations involve “competition,” or the notion that companies in competition are better off sharing certain knowledge in order to increase individual company’s benefits.
As well, the new career paths established at the White House reflect those that are becoming increasingly available to those that devote their time to the applied analytics program. Graduates can take the skills they learn at Illinois Tech (coding, economics, and social development), tap into the increasingly available open data provided by the government and elsewhere, and use their analytical skills to improve business and policy outcomes.
Applied analytics majors are particularly able to help visualize all of this open source data, taking the data points and creating maps that, for example, let the user visualize colleges based on highest salaries of graduates across the country. Some would argue that this is a far more efficient and stimulating approach to analyzing data than alternatives such as ordered lists.
I also believe that the implication of the government’s hiring of a Chief Data Scientist is that government agencies are apparently looking to expand their use of data the same way that private companies do. Applied Analytics students will thus now have opportunities in both the private and public sectors. Learn about Project Open Data and Illinois Tech’s applied analytics program and consider the newly created options to work at the city, county, state, or federal level.
