The Civic Digital Fellowship is the first of its kind data science and technology internship program for innovative students to solve pressing problems in federal agencies. It is the product of a collaboration between Coding it Forward, The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Meet the inaugural cohort of Civic Digital Fellows: Introducing the 2017 Civic Digital Fellows.
This repository features the slides our fellows presented at their end of summer Demo Day, held Tuesday August 8, 2017 at the Department of Commerce.
- Census for Small Businesses — Mariam Baqai, Anna Wang, and Rachel Dodell
Compare the current small business site with their user-centered live prototype that seeks to empower American entrepreneurs with the data they need to succeed.
- Research and Methodology — Chris Kuang, Christian Martindale, Meriton Ibrahimi, Angie Pinilla, and Nathaniel Burbank
Due to the sensitivity of the technical research and development projects these fellows worked on, these fellows were unable to share details of their work, but instead they shared the lessons they learned during their summer of civic tech.
- Redesigning My Congressional District — Francesca Bueti
Using human-centered design thinking and user research, Francesca reimagined My Congressional District, on the Census Bureau's most popular data tools, to be more geographically-intuitive and mobile-friendly.
- Census Academy — Neel Mehta
The Census Bureau collects and publishes the most comprehensive data on our nation's people, places, and economy. With Census Academy, Neel is making sure that everyday Americans have the knowledge they need to interact with and benefit from Census Bureau data. Check out his live prototype.
- Prototyping Census Partnerships — Julia Lindpaintner
As the Census Bureau gears up for the 2020 Decennial Census, it is more important than ever that it unites a wide-ranging group of private-sector partners to ensure a fair and accurate count. Taking Open Innovation concepts and combining them with user-centered design, Julia and the Census Innovation team built a comprehensive approach to outreach and partnership.
- Reinventing Web Applications: Coding for the Future — Li Wang
By taking modern tools and applying them to software at the Census Bureau, Li was able to dramatically reduce operations and maintenance costs associated with older platforms and bring a newer approach to software development.
- Machine Learning: Optimizing the Commodity Flow Survey — Andrew Cukierwar
Survey respondents to the Commodity Flow Survey, administered jointly every five years by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Transportation Statistics, have a notoriously difficult time providing responses to one specific question; responses are time-intensive and often inaccurate. Using machine learning techniques, Andrew thought outside the box and trained models to predict that specific response (a five-digit classification code) using other data in the response.
- Linking Census Data with Third Party Data — Andrea Chen
Data science fellow Andrea Chen sought to investigate the effect of federal research funding for college students on their career prospects by linking external data with internal records. Her research in the Big Data Center helped the Census Bureau better understand the benefits of using external data sources to supplement its own statistics.
Please contact Program Coordinator Adria Thomas (adria.thomas@census.gov) with any questions.