SDS Students Invited to Present at the City of Austin's DIVE Meetup

In the context of the SDS 322E Elements of Data Science course taught by Layla Guyot (pictured to the bottom right), undergraduate students conducted exploratory projects using some of the datasets available through the City of Austin open data portal. Nine students were selected to present some insights they have gained while exploring these datasets at the Data, Impact, Visuals & Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin. Featured datasets included the Austin 311 Public Data, Austin Animal Center Intakes & Outcomes, Strategic Measure Number of returns to homelessness, and the Austin MetroBike Trips. 

Students were able to develop intuitions about what to expect in the data and demonstrated critical thinking when unexpected findings emerged. Their presentations received excellent feedback and appraisal from the audience, including data owners. Moving forward, we hope to facilitate a collaboration between students and dataset owners to foster meaningful questions that would guide the data exploration, bridging the gap between emerging data experts and our local communities.