This week, two guest speakers from the Providence community joined a DATA80: Data, Ethics, and Society class: Isaac Rubinstein (Public Health Professional) who has worked with the Central Providence Unidos Health Equity Zone and Taylor Jacobs (Assistant Director of Grants and Data, Farm Fresh RI).

The DATA80: Data, Ethics and Society course, taught by the Brown University Swearer Center’s Community-Engaged Data & Evaluation Collaborative (CEDEC) Associate Director Dan Turner, provides the educational opportunity for Brown University undergraduates to grapple with some of the most pressing ethical dilemmas and challenges of our times. From the potential risk of artificial intelligence eliminating large swathes of jobs to the fundamental issues of encoding our complex work, students in DATA 80 look “under-the-hood” at the very human decisions behind an increasingly automated world. 

This week’s guest speakers discussed how their organizations address community priorities with meaningful, rigorous data collection and analysis. These guest speakers were supported by a Salomon Curricular Mini-Grant.

For Rubinstein, collaborating with the Brown University Community-Engaged Data & Evaluation Collaborative (CEDEC) enabled the Central Providence Unidos Health Equity Zone to readily access data about Health Equity Zones across Providence and better track quality of life data for residents of Providence over time. As a part of his Data Fluency Certificate capstone project, Brown undergraduate Caleb Moorhead worked with Rubinstein last year to build a data dashboard for Central Providence Unidos (read more).

Jacobs shared how Farm Fresh RI, originally founded by Brown University students in 2004, uses data ethically to continually improve the curriculum of their Harvest Kitchen program for RI youths and to efficiently provide Providence school chefs with produce from local farmers. Jacobs emphasized the importance of considering qualitative and contextualized data to best support the people that data-driven decisions will affect. Farm Fresh RI has also worked with Brown University undergraduates in the past to automate tasks from their e-commerce platform (read more).

This week’s guest speakers highlight how Brown University students are having an impact in the Providence community, and demonstrated to our students how data science can address real life challenges and affect positive change in the world.