March 3rd Sip & Chat – Research Opportunity!

Posted by Tim on February 27, 2020 in Event, Honors Experiences, Honors Program Announcements, Research Information and Opportunities

Join us for a special Sip & Chat where we will hear from multi-disciplinary faculty on their unique project, with Computing for Social Good (C4SG @ UB), that WILL HAVE OPENINGS for Honors students to become involved and contribute. This is a great opportunity to earn Honors Experience credit!

Meet the staff:

• Melanie Sage is interested in the use of technology in social work education and practice, the intersections of technology and child welfare, family engagement in child welfare and child welfare practice with indigenous families.
• Kenneth Joseph is interested in the use of machine learning for social good from an applied perspective, and the ways in which people express themselves and opinions of others on social media.
• Atri Rudra is  interested in the use of machine learning for social good from a theoretical perspective (including identifying the pitfalls of its use).
• Huei-Yen (Winnie) Chen is interested in human-machine interactions and how best to support operator performance in dynamic, complex systems, such as transportation and healthcare.
• Varun Chandola is interested in the use of machine learning for social good from a data mining perspective, and who studies scalable anomaly detection and data mining for big graphs, temporal, and spatial data.

What this particular project is about:

• There are more than 400,000 youth in foster care in the US, and each year more than 20,000 age out of foster care without reunifying with their families. The outcomes for these youth are poor. Fortunately, youth in foster care are potentially eligible to receive services, such as vocational training, that may improve their chances at positive life outcomes. However, caseworkers are typically only able to identify youth for these services after the youth experiences a relevant need or crisis. To address this problem, our final goal will be to provide a system that assists caseworks to identify youth in need of services before a crisis occurs. Developing this system includes surveying case workers in the field to identify their needs and then using this information use data visualization (and machine learning) tools to help them make better decisions.

Event Details:

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Don Schack Lounge

Please fill out the survey at this link to give us an idea of your interests and we will get back to you!

Please email Kenny Joseph (kjoseph@buffalo.edu) and/or Atri Rudra (atri@buffalo.edu) if you have more questions (but please do fill in the Google form above!)