The Coding it Forward Fellowship (formerly known as the Civic Digital Fellowship for Federal placements, and the Civic Innovation Corps for State and Local placements) is a first-of-its-kind internship for mission-driven, student software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers to innovate at the intersection of technology and public service.
We are grateful for agency and host office partners who provided our Fellows with the opportunity to serve and grow this summer:
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- General Services Administration
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Internal Revenue Service, Kessel Run
- National Institutes of Health
- U.S. Special Operations Command.
- Austin Transportation, Data & Technology Services
- Boston Citywide Analytics Team
- Boston Department of Innovation and Technology
- California Office of Digital Innovation
- Los Angeles Mayor’s Data Team
- Los Angeles Innovation Team
- Miami’s Department of Innovation and Technology
- New Jersey Office of Innovation
- NYC Department of City Planning, Data Engineering Team
- NYC Department of City Planning, Planning Labs
- NYC Department of City Planning, Regional Planning
- NYC Department of City Planning, Urban Design Office
- NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene’s Center for Health Equity & Community Wellness
- NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics
- NYC Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity
- NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer
- NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission
- San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation
- Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget
The Fellowship also wouldn't be possible without support from our generous supporters: Schmidt Futures and the Ford Foundation.
Meet the 98 young technologists who served in our sixth cohort of the Civic Digital Fellowship: Introducing the 2021 Civic Digital Fellows.
Meet the 55 young technologists who served in our inaugural cohort of the Civic Innovation Corps: Introducing the 2021 Civic Innovation Corps Members
This repository features the slides that Fellows presented during their respective end-of-summer presentations at their host agencies. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s virtual end-of-summer celebration, with keynote remarks from D.J. Patil, the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist.
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available or they presented their accomplishments during a panel discussion.
Ahsanul Abeer is a Senior at the City College of New York studying Business Administration with a focus on Technology Management. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration on the Presidential Innovation Fellowship team to improve the usability of their website through heuristics evaluation, usability testing, and software development. His changes were made on the Fellows page of the website where he assisted in the deployment of the card layout of the main content and a filter system to filter fellows by specialty and year. | Presentation
Akhil Kondepudi is a rising senior at the University of Michigan studying Neuroscience and Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration Technology Transformation Service, where he maintained and developed software for the AI Grand Challenge for Resilience, a data science challenge aimed at utilizing text analytics to better understand the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. | Presentation
Alex Hayward is a rising senior at The University of Chicago studying Molecular Engineering and Data Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health in the Office of Research Training, Diversity, and Disparities, a division of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Her work focused on identifying racial and ethnic disparities in NIDA’s grant portfolio, determining what factors drive success in NIDA grant applications, and proposing data-driven initiatives to increase equity in NIDA's funding of addiction research. Wrangling data of over 35,000 NIDA grant applications, she used data visualization and statistical analysis to identify disparities and build machine learning models to predict whether a NIDA grant application was likely to be funded. From her insights, she recommended evidence-based actions that NIDA can take to increase racial and ethnic equity in the distribution of over $1 billion in annual funds towards addiction research. | Presentation
Alisha Gurnani is a recent graduate of Columbia University where she received a Master’s in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on a minimum viable product for an economic well-being index, a composite index made up of several economic, social, and demographic data topics such as Environment, Business Health, Income, and Housing to provide improved and more holistic pictures of each state's wellbeing. Using federal open data, Alisha was able to provide concise measures of economic activity and quality of life for each state. In addition, she created an interactive dashboard to visualize the index and its topics.
Allie Harris is a second-year master’s student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying Integrated Design and Management. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau supporting the Census Open Innovation Lab (COIL) team in scaling their flagship program, The Opportunity Project (TOP), across the federal government. As part of this effort, Allie designed a community of practice model that will empower new partners with a supportive network and developed a strategic plan for enabling the adoption of COIL's open innovation model across government. | Presentation
Anjali Kanthilal is a second-year master’s student at the University of Southern California studying Integrated Design, Business, and Technology. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Help Center Redesign Initiative, which aims to replace the current public help and FAQ page from ask.census.gov with a new section on the main census.gov site. Through stakeholder interviews, data analysis, design upgrades, and a new backend site, the new Help Center will allow millions of Americans to quickly find the right Census Bureau information, data, tools, and services they need via self-service. | Presentation
Anna Daccache is a second-year master’s student at Northeastern University studying Computer Science. This summer, they worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to better understand the drivers of telemedicine use in Medicare and Medicaid eligible populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anna leveraged internal CMS datasets and external CDC and Microsoft datasets in their machine learning approach.
Anna-Maria Gueorguieva is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science and Legal Studies.
Annie Kim is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she studied Information Science and Art History. This summer, she worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) as a Design Fellow supporting an 8-week design sprint to design the UX and UI of the Provider Data Service website, making Medicare provider data more accessible, responsive, and accurate to users. | Presentation
Annika Lin is a rising sophomore at Georgetown University studying Economics. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health supporting the Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. Her work involved automating the STRIDES billing report creation and distribution process, resulting in saving the STRIDES initiative 700 hours and $150k annually. In addition, Annika analyzed cloud billing and usage data in R to identify trends among service categories and organization types, resulting in Tableau data visualizations that were presented to the Office of Data Science Strategy and STRIDES team. | Presentation
Anuva Banwasi is a rising sophomore at Columbia University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), within the National Institutes of Health, developing an automated pipeline to characterize and analyze NIAID-funded data science projects. As part of her work, Anuva created a machine learning classifier to identify data-science-related projects as well as helped build a platform-independent dashboard to annotate and visualize the rich portfolio of projects within NIAID. | Presentation
Ariana Gamara is a recent graduate of Cornell University, where she studied Information Science and Sociology. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service in the Office of Online Services, which focuses on improving the online taxpayer experience. Ariana helped design a virtual assistant that will assist taxpayers in completing tax-related tasks by explaining information. As part of this process, she created best practices, user flows, and wireframes.
Bhav Jain is a rising junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying Computer Science and Brain & Cognitive Sciences. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Chief Data Officer on redesigning HealthData.gov, a data warehouse that fosters health innovation across the public, private, academic, and non-profit sectors. Bhav worked to improve the accessibility of available health-related datasets by creating a streamlined user experience. | Presentation
Bobby Wells is a recent graduate from Tufts University with a B.S. in Computer Science and Science, Technology, and Society Studies with a Focus in Mathematics and Modeling and a minor in French. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Science Fellow on County Business Patterns (CBP). Bobby evaluated external data sources for their quality and usability for the CBP revenue project, which aims to add revenue as a metric to the CBP so that users can understand their data in the broader context of the economy. | Presentation
Brenda Li is a first-year Master’s student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she worked with the International Price Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a project developing alternative import and export price indexes using administrative rather than survey data. She explored various research and data questions related to this task, including linking export transactions between the administrative and survey data sources to investigate how closely prices aligned and whether there was unit value bias. | Presentation
Brooke Tran is a Master's student at Stanford studying Computational Social Science. This summer, she worked in the Economy-Wide Statistics Division within the U.S. Census Bureau to develop more robust measures of a firm's overall economic impact by creating Impact Scores — a composite score of several key economic indicators — to assist analysts with better tools for prioritization and data collection strategies. | Presentation
Carsen Miller is a senior at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Kessel Run on the K8s Services team, which is responsible for developing tools and resources to ensure an efficient and streamlined migration of all Kessel Run applications from Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. Carsen worked on user stories that capture this objective from various perspectives, from messaging services to API development. These experiences helped shape a comprehensive understanding of the work that goes into ensuring efficient development at a platform level with various technical and security dependencies.
Charlie Liu is a sophomore at Yale University studying Computer Science and Ethics, Politics, and Economics. This summer, he worked as a Software Engineering Fellow at the General Services Administration Technology Transformation Service, working on the “Contact Elected Officials” page on the USA.gov website to make it easier for people to find their local elected officials while staying on the USA.gov website. This work is scheduled to launch on USA.gov in the near future. | Presentation
Chizobam Nwagwu is a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied Public Policy and Management. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Chief Data Officer on redesigning HealthData.gov, a data warehouse that fosters health innovation across the public, private, academic, and non-profit sectors. Chizobam worked to improve the accessibility of available health-related datasets by creating a streamlined user experience. | Presentation
Cindy Wang is a second-year Master's student at Northwestern University studying Business Administration and Design Innovation. This summer, she worked at the Department of Health and Human Services on a project exploring how social determinants of health affect community well-being and opportunities to address inequities and authored a human-centered design report on her findings. In addition, Cindy supported a user research project on the experiences of technology teams participating in our agency's The Opportunity Project technology sprint. | Presentation
Dom Frecentese is a recent graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a Master’s in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on a project that explored the various administrative data sources (e.g. IRS, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP) available for building out a Demographic Frame, a centralized dataset of demographic information at the Census Bureau. Dom analyzed the population of each data source, how the populations overlap with each other, and where the administrative data sources may be missing individuals and addresses. | Presentation
Duke Best is a recent graduate of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he studied Web Development. This summer, he worked as a Product Management Fellow at the Office of Strategic Coordination within the National Institutes of Health to identify root causes and develop a solution for maintaining accurate staff management data, create user guide documentation and use case examples for a new custom dashboard tool, and apply product management frameworks to document a new feature for a data integration and management tool. | Presentation
Dylan Irlbeck is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration - Technology Transformation Service (TTS) to improve the TTS Handbook, a public-facing documentation site for TTS employees. Dylan’s work included integrating NetlifyCMS into the Handbook so that contributors wouldn't need to know Git, GitHub, or web development; rewriting TTS's diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility page; and authoring a blog post announcing the Handbook and stating its values. | Presentation
Elisa Ngan is a graduate candidate in the Masters in Design Engineering program at Harvard Graduate School of Design and the School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. This summer, she worked as a Design Fellow at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Along with assisting the team on research, design, and testing of a new prototype, she mapped and developed an internal data dictionary for product teams to integrate legally operative terms into design processes while educating the wider organization on digitization, culture, and socio-technical systems.
Emma Pan is a recent graduate of the Olin College of Engineering, where she studied Engineering with Computing. This summer, she worked at the Department of Health and Human Services on a project exploring how social determinants of health affect community well-being and opportunities to address inequities and authored a human-centered design report on her findings. In addition, Emma supported a user research project on the experiences of technology teams participating in our agency's The Opportunity Project technology sprint. | Presentation
Erica Iniguez is a recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego where she studied Cognitive Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on Census Academy, the leading training hub for U.S. Census Bureau data, to improve the site’s overall user experience. Erica engaged directly with users through usability testing and provided the Census Academy team with valuable feedback. Ultimately, she designed a new landing page and sharable content, such as badges, to improve the Census Academy’s overall user experience. | Presentation
Erica Kong is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied Computer Science and Data Science. This summer, Erica worked at the Internal Revenue Service on the Small Business/Self-Employed Research (SBR) team to evaluate and improve an existing prototype model to better perform case selection. Erica pulled data from several terabytes of records to help identify patterns and build risk models.
Erik Duxstad is a rising Junior at Purdue University studying Computer Engineering. This summer he worked on an internal feedback survey and dashboard for the U.S Census Bureau to collect data about the level of service being provided by the Application Development Software Division. The goal of the project was to increase feedback and communication between branches of the Census Bureau and allow branches to track customer satisfaction. | Presentation
Eshaan Agrawal is a rising junior at the University of Georgia studying Computer Science and Cognitive Science. This summer, he worked in the Division of Data Integration, Modeling, and Analytics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences within the National Institutes of Health. Eshaan developed a Natural Language Processing algorithm that enabled the office to determine whether grant proposals were related to health disparities or minority health in an effort to increase equity. He also developed a live dashboard that automates budget tracking for division and institute directors. | Presentation
Evelyn DiSalvo is a senior at Carnegie Mellon University studying Design and Ethics, History, & Public Policy. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Center for New Media and Programming on creating a social media toolkit for the release of 2020 redistricting data. This toolkit provided partners of the Census Bureau with all of the content and resources necessary to promote this important data release on social media. | Presentation
Fardous Sabnur is a first-year master’s student at the City University of New York — Hunter College studying Statistics. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Training and Statistical Development Branch on the Demographic Analysis and Population Projection Systems (DAPPS) project. She created over 20 analysis methods using R, modernizing the code for a growing user base. | Presentation
Francesca Marini is a second-year master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer & Information Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Reimbursable Surveys Division on the Census Numident, a dataset built from Social Security application data and contains information about individuals, including place of birth; many researchers in and outside of the Census Bureau use this dataset to study populations over time. Her project developed a standardized, recommended data crosswalk for use with the Census Numident by mapping individuals to place of birth numerical codes in the Geographic Names Information System dataset. | Presentation
Helen Chung is a recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor's degree in Data Science and Political Science. This summer, she worked with the Office of Prices and Living Conditions (OPLC) at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on their Data Lakes Pilot Program. During her time with BLS, she used cloud-based services to develop a data pipeline automating the process of acquiring and processing alternative price data used by programs producing Principal Federal Economic Indicators. | Presentation
Ifraz Ahmed is in his final semester of graduate school at the University of Houston where he will obtain a Master of Science in Business Analytics. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service with the Small Business/Self Employed Research team to implement an R front end for Apache Spark. He was responsible for creating the SparkR environment, connecting to Hadoop, and performing ETL on the dataset. This project will make the team’s current workflow faster, more reliable, and more scalable. | Presentation
Jacob Cuomo is a rising senior at Middle Tennessee State University studying Computer Science, Mathematics, and Data Science. This summer, he worked as a Software Engineering Fellow at the General Services Administration Technology Transformation Service, working on the “Contact Elected Officials” page on the USA.gov website to make it easier for people to find their local elected officials while staying on the USA.gov website. This work is scheduled to launch on USA.gov in the near future. | Presentation
Jake Tompkins is a second-year master’s student at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Library and Information Science. This summer, he worked as a Design Fellow at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where he helped design a new process for submitting Form 911, a critical form used by taxpayers to request assistance from Taxpayer Advocate Services (TAS) if they are experiencing a systemic issue that can’t be resolved through normal channels. Previously, Form 911 was in a PDF format and required a taxpayer to print, fill out, scan, and fax/mail it to a TAS office. Jake created an expanded qualifier tool that helps ensure a taxpayer meets the criteria for Form 911 and built a new form in HTML that can be submitted electronically on a desktop computer or mobile device directly on the TAS website. | Presentation
James Scharf is a first-year master's student at Johns Hopkins University studying Computer Science.
Jane Boettcher is a second-year master’s student at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Science Fellow supporting the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a nationally integrated repository of data following individuals through the criminal justice system. CJARS reports allow agencies, who provide data, to evaluate their data in a larger context and ensure the project is nationally representative. Jane developed an automatic statistical report generator for CJARS, making it easier for reports to be produced.
Jason D'Amico is a junior at Union College studying Computer Engineering. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration as a Product Management Fellow supporting the President’s Management Agenda. Jason developed a prototype, based on the self-reported performance data of government agencies, that automates business intelligence reporting. The product facilitates collaboration between agencies, streamlining the process of getting teams the assistance they need and accurately summarizing the goal statuses of each agency. | [Presentation](Jason D_Amico.pdf)
Jason Jewik is a rising senior at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics supporting the Office of Technology and Survey Processing. Jason built an extract-transform-load pipeline to process logs generated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' web servers. The data files generated by this pipeline were used to train machine learning models for projecting web server errors, making it easier to predict and prevent issues that hinder BLS productivity.
Jenny Lin is a second-year master’s student at the School of Visual Arts studying Design for Social Innovation. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service in the Office of Online Services on an inclusive design strategy centered around serving underrepresented taxpayer groups, such as those with limited English proficiency. Jenny’s process primarily manifested in building momentum for cross-team partnerships, interviewing front-line staff, then analyzing and synthesizing findings into key takeaways and suggestions for next steps.
Jessica Shi is a rising sophomore at Columbia University studying Operations Research. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Science Fellow supporting the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a nationally integrated repository of data following individuals through the criminal justice system. CJARS reports allow agencies, who provide data, to evaluate their data in a larger context and ensure the project is nationally representative. Jessica developed an automatic statistical report generator for CJARS, making it easier for reports to be produced.
Joe Kerrigan is a junior at the University of Virginia studying Computer Science.
Joe Suh is a second-year master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania studying computer science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. General Services Administration in the Office of the CTO to build TechRadar—a product initiative to accelerate Federal emerging technology assessment, alignment, and action by converging crucial content, connections, and consensus on a central digital platform.
Jordan Jomsky is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Data Science and Molecular and Cell Biology. This summer, he worked in the Division of Data Integration, Modeling, and Analytics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences within the National Institutes of Health. Jordan developed a Natural Language Processing algorithm that enabled the office to determine whether grant proposals were related to health disparities or minority health in an effort to increase equity. | Presentation
Joseph Lee is a sophomore at William & Mary studying Computer Science.
Joshua Archibald is a junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science.
Julian Grunauer is a rising senior at Dartmouth College studying Computer Science and Cognitive Science. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service in the Office of Online Services on an inclusive design strategy centered around serving underrepresented taxpayer groups, such as those with limited English proficiency. Julian mapped out the current design process and determined design standards.
Jun Huang is a recent graduate of the City University of New York, Baruch College with a degree in Computer Information Systems. This summer, he worked as a Software Engineering Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Training and Statistical Development Branch on the Demographic Analysis and Population Projection Systems (DAPPS) project. DAPPS is originally a Windows .NET application used to analyze population data and create population projections. During the Fellowship, Jun rebuilt DAPPS’ features and user interface using Electron.js and transformed RUP analysis methods into R functions. In addition, he integrated the R functions into an Electron executable application that is compatible with MacOS and Windows OS. | Presentation
Kashyap Sreeram is a rising sophomore at Duke University studying Bioinformatics Systems in Therapeutic Neurogenetics and Mental Health Policy. This summer, he worked at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) within the National Institutes of Health. With the rise in Data Availability Statements (DAS) in scientific publications over the last 5 years, data sharing has become an important cornerstone for the validation of scientific research and its results. Kashyap focused on using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze DASs from NIEHS-funded publications on PubMed Central (PMC), gaining insight into the standardization, clinical/translation applicability, variability, and "success" (measured by the FAIR principles) of data sharing. Through a deeper understanding of DAS information, the end goal is to build a PMC-integrated software tool that standardizes NIH-funded publication DASs, extracts important metadata, and validates if data sharing follows the FAIR principles. | Presentation
Kate Vavra-Musser is a Fourth Year Ph.D. Student at the University of Southern California studying Population, Health, and Place. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Demographic Programs-Survey Operations team. Kate designed a data linkage framework to produce a dataset of information on physicians practicing in the United States. She joined multiple data sources within the Census Bureau and other government agencies to produce a dataset that includes demographic and professional information on physicians as well as information on their places of employment. This dataset can support a greater understanding of the current state of the United States healthcare system and how it has evolved over time. | Presentation
Katie Taylor is a rising junior at Western Washington University majoring in Computer Science. This summer, they worked at the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey Office on a web-based Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tables Tool for increasing data accessibility in EEO data dissemination, which is used to uphold equitable employment practices. They increased users’ ability to access data through the tool by 14 data tables (from 6 tables initially to 20 tables now) and improved the user interface for selecting the table and geography. | Presentation
Katie Harris is a first-year Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Public Policy and Data Analysis. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Science Fellow on County Business Patterns (CBP). Katie analyzed annual survey data across several industries, including Retail, Wholesale, and Services, to add revenue to the CBP data product. The project created a data pipeline that extracted survey data, cleaned, and aggregated it at different levels so that it can be used in a larger, existing imputation pipeline. | Presentation
Kedar Garzon Gupta is a recent graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied Cognitive Science. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service supporting the Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics Division. His project focused on translating IRS tax content into Spanish utilizing a Natural Language Processing model to help the IRS develop tools to translate English-based tax forms and create intelligent assistants to help Spanish-speaking taxpayers. | Presentation
Kelemua Tesfaye is a senior at Seattle University studying Applied Mathematics. This summer, Kelemua worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Income Statistics Branch, which is responsible for producing and disseminating income estimates across multiple household surveys. Hundreds of tables from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement are released annually providing detailed income estimates. Kelemua created a Python application to automate quality checks for the Detailed Income Tables produced as part of this annual release. | Presentation
Kenisha Stills is a rising junior at Cornell University studying Computer Science with a focus on Public Policy and Cybersecurity.
Laura Fang is a rising junior at Princeton University studying Operations Research and Financial Engineering. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Enterprise Dissemination to develop an automated algorithm using APIs and Natural Language Processing techniques to locate research publications that used Census Bureau datasets. | Presentation
Lia Chin-Purcell is a first-year Master's student at the University of California, Berkeley studying Information Management and Systems.
Lotenna Nwobbi is a recent graduate of Harvey Mudd College where he studied Mathematics, Environmental Science, and Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service integrating network analysis into the agency's understanding of government contracts to visualize complex vendor and agency relationships and investigating fraud or bias in vendor procurement. | Presentation
Lucas Schaberg is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science. This summer, Lucas worked at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate. He contributed to a full-stack web application that assists Asylum Officers in performing interviews. Lucas contributed to new features including a notification system, bug fixes, and usability improvements.
Lucia Korpas is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where she received an MSE in Mechanical Engineering. This summer, she served as a Data Science Fellow at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Office of Compensation and Working Conditions (OCWC). Under Department of Labor regulations, every employer is required to provide information to workers and state and local governments before a plant closing or mass layoff—referred to as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice (WARN). These data are an important source of information about the well-being of workers as well as understanding which types of businesses are affected by business cycles or economic shocks (such as a pandemic). Currently, these reports are posted by states on their websites, but not completely collected and reported by DOL or other government agencies. Lucia built a framework to automate the scraping, parsing, and cleaning of data from individual states' WARN notices, enabling the creation of a new data set of over 40,000 notices from more than 40 states. | Presentation
Lydia Hu is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in Computer Science. This summer, Lydia worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Demographic Directorate supporting the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which provides data about the provision and use of ambulatory medical care services in the United States. She authored a paper that investigates and analyzes a group of potential Electronic Health Records data options for use for the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, as part of a larger effort to modernize the survey's collection of patient visit data. The paper identifies each data option's fitness with the survey's needs in areas such as geography and accessibility and identifies the gaps in understanding. | Presentation
Madhav Aggarwal is a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Computer Science and Economics.
Mars Ikeda is a recent graduate of the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library with an Associate's degree in Liberal Arts and will be continuing their education in Statistics & Data Sciences at Smith College. This summer, they worked at the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal, and Skin Diseases within the National Institutes of Health to improve their data management in light of a new policy going into effect in 2023. Mars created a handbook called the Toolbox that had data management information, exercises, and a data flow map to prepare the researchers for the upcoming NIH policy in data management change. Through partner engagement, they also set up a Clean the Clutter Campaign that will use a phased approach to organizing data backlog. | Presentation
Maya Albayrak is a rising junior at Carnegie Mellon University studying Statistics and Human-Computer Interaction. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Indicators Division, which is responsible for the release of 12 Principal Federal Economic Indicators. Maya worked with her team to construct an interactive dashboard with Plotly Dash to improve the current Economic Indicator dashboard. She used user testing to fine-tune the new dashboard’s usability. | Presentation
Merritt Smith is a rising second-year Master’s student at the University of Chicago where he studies Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Commodity Flow Survey (CFS). Merritt built a machine learning pipeline to predict where a given shipment of goods from the CFS would leave the United States based on its attributes. | Presentation
Michelle Li is a rising junior at Yale University studying Computing and the Arts. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health supporting the Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. Michelle developed branding guidelines and wordmarks for the STRIDES team. In addition, she also completed user research to better understand STRIDES’ users' needs for cloud cost reporting. | Presentation
Mounika Adepu is a rising junior at Duke University majoring in Data Science. This summer, she worked in the Economic Indicators Division of the U.S. Census Bureau to develop a prototype of an interactive dashboard that provides a snapshot of the US economy to external users of the Economic Indicator webpage on the Census website. | Presentation
Nathan Bartley is a 4th year Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a Data Science Fellow in the Office of Safety, Health, and Working Conditions to ensure the accuracy of the data used for the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII). SOII data is used by occupational safety and health professionals, private industry, state and local government, and researchers across the country to improve the safety of American workers; the safety and lives of millions of American workers rely, in part, on its accuracy. Nathan employed Natural Language Processing techniques to automate extraction from death certificates to verify the integrity of SOII data, with the longer-term goal of automating data ingestion. | Presentation
Neil Khurana is a rising senior at Harvard University studying Statistics.
Nikasha Patel is a rising senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying Computation and Cognition. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Policy and Data Stewardship Branch, which is responsible for implementing agency-wide use of the Data Management System to register datasets and initiate projects. At the Bureau, registered datasets in the Data Management System (DMS) are required to list the location of their metadata in the Administrative Record share (ADREC), which is a data warehouse containing all the source metadata needed for datasets. However, many DMS datasets are missing links to their ADREC location, which makes it difficult for Bureau researchers and information owners to find the datasets they’re looking for. Nikasha utilized data cleaning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to find hundreds of missing ADREC locations efficiently and accurately so that researchers can find metadata quickly. | Presentation
Noah Capucilli-Shatan is a rising senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Census and Survey Processing System (CSPro), a software program used for data collection and processing by statistics offices throughout the world, particularly in developing countries. Noah worked on several components of CSPro, but primarily focused on improving users' ability to analyze and visualize their data by generating reports and creating maps of their data. | Presentation
Pearl Zhang is a rising junior at Swarthmore College studying Computer Science and Educational Studies. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics redesigning “BLS 101”, an educational website that helps acclimate users to BLS data and the concepts that underlie the data. Pearl designed a delivery vehicle for the content to increase accessibility and improve user experience. | Presentation
Ralph Buan is a recent graduate of Santa Monica College with a degree in Interaction Design. This summer, they worked at the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal, and Skin Diseases within the National Institutes of Health to improve their data management in light of a new policy going into effect in 2023. Ralph created a handbook called the Toolbox that had data management information, exercises, and a data flow map to prepare the researchers for the upcoming NIH policy in data management change. Through partner engagement, he also set up a Clean the Clutter Campaign that will use a phased approach to organizing data backlog. | Presentation
Rebecca Xunis a rising senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Data Products Development Branch of the American Community Survey (ACS) Office, which oversees the ACS, a demographics household survey that covers employment, race, and much more. Data from the ACS is also used to create Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) tables, a custom tabulation that is designed to measure the effects of and compliance with EEO laws. Rebecca improved the user experience of the EEO tables data tool by providing county components for any suppressed geographies, as well as conducted user research on the FTP site. | Presentation
Ruthie Chen is a second-year MBA student at Yale School of Management studying Business and Management. This summer, she worked at the Census Open Innovation Labs at the U.S. Census Bureau supporting an effort to scale their flagship program, the Opportunity Project (TOP), across the federal government. Ruthie created a self-service website experience that clearly conveys what TOP is and how it works for prospective agencies. | Presentation
Ryan Adra is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine with a degree in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) within the National Institutes of Health on a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) Tracker Resource tool that compiles and visualizes data relating to the FOA planning and implementation process. Ryan conducted user research through user interviews, user personas, process maps, and competitive analysis to understand the process and highlight pain points with the current workflow. | Presentation
Sachi Figliolini is a rising sophomore at the University of Washington studying Informatics. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Strategic & Portfolio Management Office of the Economic Directorate. Sachi worked with various stakeholders across the organization to help leadership make better informed staffing and resource decisions by creating dashboards in PowerBI. She also helped summarize and analyze the data for the leadership team.
Sam Craig is a rising senior at the Oberlin College and Conservatory studying Computer Science and Double Bass Performance. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health on a Survey Data Aggregator, which provides a quick and easy interface for uploading and examining an office's Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, a yearly employee satisfaction survey given to the entire federal government. Rather than receiving a new spreadsheet every year and having to dig in the office's computer files to find the prior years' results to compare to, now the office can have one single database to store all the data and a flexible table-building system to slice and dice the data exactly how they want. | Presentation
Samantha Chai is a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Cognitive Science. This summer, she worked at Kessel Run on the All Domain Common Platform (ACDP), which is the fully-managed platform for Command and Control (C2) applications. Sam helped improve the ADCP Documentation Initiative through conducting stakeholder interviews and designing mockups for the platform.
Sarah Birmingham is a first-year Master’s student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Information Science & Big Data Analytics. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), which produces a complete count of all fatalities that occur during a calendar year as a result of workplace injuries. The program has recently changed its publishability requirements to protect the confidentiality of the underlying data in order to ensure data providers will continue to furnish the information necessary to produce statistics that are extremely valuable to the public health community. Sarah attempted a database reconstruction attack, or inference of confidential data using published data, on previous years' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries to test and evaluate the new publishability requirements. | Presentation
Sarah Coloma is a second-year master’s student at George Washington University studying Interaction Design. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration - Technology Transformation Service as a Design Fellow on the Login.gov product. Sarah’s project focused on redesigning a sign-in interface to reduce customer support requests and empower users to more quickly self-diagnose and recover from their errors.
Shana Hadi is a senior at Stanford University studying Computer Science and English. This summer, Shana worked at the U.S. Census Bureau and created a full-stack web application to automate Justice Assistance Data Survey (JADS) tabulations. This resulted in a centralized system for fetching and managing data, a streamlined user interface, and reductions in manual user interventions, thus leading to time and cost savings. | Presentation
Shira Abramovich is a recent graduate from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature-Translation and Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics. Shira built a user interface for the record linkage of two surveys, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and the Foreign Direct Investment, to empower analysts to complete their reviews more effectively and remove or add linkages as necessary. | Presentation
Simon Pastor is an incoming first-year Master’s student at Yale University studying Public Policy with a specialization in Data Science in Politics. This summer, he worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Office of Productivity and Technology (OPT), which is responsible for measuring changes in productivity for industries and major sectors of the U.S. economy. Simon developed a tool that automated days of analysis and visualization to quickly extract important highlights and trends from new or revised data. | Presentation
Simran Parwani is a recent graduate from New York University Abu Dhabi with a degree in Computer Science and Interactive Media. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Reimbursable Surveys Division, which conducts the Annual Business Survey (ABS). The ABS provides information on selected economic and demographic characteristics for businesses and business owners by sex, ethnicity, race, and veteran status, as well as measures of research and development, new business topics, and more. Simran built data visualization products for the ABS, including a Data Explorer tool which will help data users access the data they need and see high-level statistics about demographic data at a selected cross level. | Presentation
Snipta Mallick is a rising senior at the University of Texas at Dallas studying Computer Science and Cognitive Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supporting the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies (ODSET). ODSET builds partnerships across the NIH to harness the power of data by coordinating NIAID's data science portfolio. Snipta developed the NIAID Data Science (NDS) Dashboard, a platform that offers an independent, accessible user interface to analyze, curate, and visualize data science projects at NIAID to assist in partnership efforts. Through this dashboard, users can see a visual overview of data projects and view the results of machine learning classifiers that further categorize project abstracts. | Presentation
Sophie Schafer is a recent graduate from Carleton College with a degree in Mathematics. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Indicators Division, which is responsible for the release of 12 Principal Federal Economic Indicators. Sophie worked with her team to reimagine the Economic Indicator Division dashboard to be interactive and user-focused, with a visual landing page before accessing the easily digestible briefing room. Her team created prototypes and performed user testing to ensure that the product was indeed useful for its users. | Presentation
Sydney Trieu is a recent graduate from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Data Science. This summer, Sydney worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of the average change over time in the prices of consumer items—goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living. The CPI is moving forward with replacing or supplementing data collected by in-person visits to stores across the country with price data from large corporate provided data sets or web scraped data. Sydney focused on procuring training data, built modeling infrastructure, and developed an autoencoder to label third-party datasets of consumer items. | Presentation
Tim Lynch is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Statistics & Analytics / Economics. This summer, he worked as a Data Science Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Statistical Methods Division. Tim’s project focused on evaluating and improving a data-driven methodology for generating product lists in the Economic Census. This methodology, known as the Triple-80 Approach, has the capacity to decrease respondent burden and improve data quality, but needed to be updated and reevaluated due to the introduction of a new system for classifying products. | Presentation
Tommy Nguyen is a rising junior at Drexel University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on Census Academy, a platform that provides educational resources on the kinds of data available from the U.S. Census Bureau and promotes helpful tools that leverage this data. Tommy worked on Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE), which aims to expand the work of Census Academy by providing a low-cost, flexible, built-with-modern-tooling platform that allows for more engaging educational and digital experiences. | Presentation
Victor Kalil is a rising senior at Washington University in St. Louis studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked on the Identity and Access Management team at the Internal Revenue Service. Victor created a technical cloud migration plan for the IRS’s newest identity and authentication system in collaboration with developers, analysts, and other team members. The migration plan details technologies, management strategies, and the latest National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines that the system must meet. | Presentation
Vishnu Karthik is a sophomore at the University of Michigan studying Computer Science.
William Huang is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Electrical Engineering. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health as a Data Science Fellow in the Office of AIDS Research (OAR). William supported OAR’s grantmaking efforts by developing a deep learning model that automated the manual encoding SIC codes, objective codes, and areas of emphasis for project abstracts. He also created a database system and visualizations to analyze the funding of different topic areas and the relationships between different funding offices across NIH. | Presentation
Yashas Vaidya is a first-year master's student at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying Computer Science.
Yuyang Zhong is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in Psychology and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health as a Data Science Fellow in the Office of AIDS Research (OAR). Yuyang supported OAR’s grantmaking efforts by developing a deep learning model that automated the manual encoding SIC codes, objective codes, and areas of emphasis for project abstracts. He also created a database system and visualizations to analyze the funding of different topic areas and the relationships between different funding offices across NIH. | Presentation
Zoe Chyatte is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Cognitive Science.
Zoe Zemper is a rising senior at the University of Michigan studying Information Analysis & Cognitive Science. This summer, Zoe worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program, a Federal-State program that partners with state tax departments to collect and publish employment and wage information at the local, county, and metropolitan-statistical levels. This Census is produced using two reports, one of which is the Multiple Worksite Report (MWR), which is mandatory in 31 states and required or requested of most multi-location employers with a total of 10 or more employees. This summer, Zoe used Python and SQLite to build a database to identify non-respondents of the MWR and produced data visualizations with MatPlotLib to analyze non-respondent data. | Presentation
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available or they presented their accomplishments during a panel discussion.
Ada Zhou is a graduate student at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the State of California's Office of Digital Innovation with fellow Corps member Marisa Weidner. They worked across various digital sites and services serving Californians in a product management capacity. Together they helped push forward the momentum for researching user needs on the flagship ca.gov site - interviewing over 24 Californians and surveying thousands, planned sprints for the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental team working on the new Cannabis Control Department site, and laid groundwork for a project to redesign the state agency and employee directory. | Presentation
Albert Zhang is a rising senior at Harvard University studying Art, Film, and Visual Studies. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Planning Labs redesigning NYC's zoning maps to be color-blind friendly. His final product was a newly designed High-Contrast mode that made Planning Labs’ color-dense maps much more readable to color-blind users. | Presentation
AJ Nadel is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Urban Studies, Computer Science.
Alex Santangelo is a rising junior at Syracuse University studying Industrial & Interaction Design. This summer, she worked with the New York City Department of City Planning’s Planning Labs to update the user interface of their Zoning and Land Use Application website, adapt it to a mobile platform, and to make the site more accessible for visually impaired users. She used Figma to create graphical solutions to these issues and got feedback from users, and then created an executive summary for the engineers to implement the solutions. | Presentation
Andi Halim is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science.
Annie Phan is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy.
Antonio Jordan is a rising senior at CUNY City College of New York studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics team creating an overtime dashboard for the City's Property Management department, with the goal of predicting future spending and implementing a pre-approval process for overtime. | Presentation
Anya Dunaif is a graduate of the University of Chicago where she studied Biological Sciences with a Specialization in Microbiology. She is also a recent graduate of Fullstack Academy where she studied Software Development. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer on a project called Landing Page as a Service. It is a customizable landing page template designed for NYC agencies to easily set up their own static website. The website is accessible, mobile responsive, and includes multilingual support. | Presentation
Ava Nordling is a rising senior at Northeastern University studying Experience Design. This summer, she joined the four-person Service Design Studio at the New York City Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity. She conducted exploratory interviews, delivered robust cultural research synthesis, and crafted representative language for a website documenting the inaugural "Designed by Community" fellowship. Ava shared that creating iteratively throughout the summer combined her deepest passions of communal visioning into a living practice, and grew her design mind exponentially. | Presentation
Britney Johnson is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying Human-Centered Computing. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (MOCTO) where she served as the Product Manager for two products: Landing Page as a Service (LPaaS) 2.0 and the Feedback Module. The LPaaS 2.0 product provides clients with an easier way to create their own landing pages, and the Feedback Module provides visitors of city agencies' websites with a way to directly send feedback. | Presentation
Bryson Oar is a recent graduate of the University of Utah where he studied Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget using React to revitalize and enhance an older budget management application. The enhancements streamlined and structured the entire process by which agencies track and report performance measures.
Calvin Chen is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Computer Science and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the Los Angeles Mayor’s Data Team analyzing the City's awarded procurement opportunities for the past 5 years and determined if there were inequitable trends between disadvantaged businesses, minority-owned businesses, and women-owned businesses versus businesses that were none of these categories. From building a pipeline from Salesforce to Tableau, his team determined that there was a great discrepancy between the awards granted by the City to these different business types by NAICS code, and listed several recommendations for how the City might combat these inequities for the future. | Presentation
Carolyn Wang is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science and Political Economy. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the City of Boston's Department of Innovation and Technology. She coded over 10 components to replace and decommission legacy applications, ultimately providing greater internal efficiency. Her project increased user accessibility and significantly improved the public's experience with resources and services.
Chithra Anand is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science. This summer, she served as full stack technical lead developer of a team of 5 interns to develop a web app using Javascript/React, HTML/CSS, Firebase that leverages modern NLP, cloud, and computational law techniques to dynamically store, access, and release police records to the public at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. She implemented an advanced fuzzy search functionality using Python NLP libraries. The project was acquired by the City of San José to deploy the app for use by 1 million+ citizens, to encourage greater law enforcement transparency.
Daniel Wilson is a graduate student at the University of Toronto studying Cognitive Neuroscience. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity on a project that involved creating a web app which replicated and extended the information from the Office’s annual Poverty Report. As, currently, the report is only released as a pdf the goal was to make the information contained in the report more accessible, dynamic, and extensible with interactive plots and downloadable data. | Presentation
David Dodds is a recent graduate of Lambda School where he studied Data Science and Machine Learning.
David Stansbury is a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School where he earned his Masters related to Technology Policy. This summer, he worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget where he managed the development of a new performance measures portal built into an existing budget management application. To this end, he conducted interviews with nearly 60 stakeholders including government analysts, policy organizations, the media, and legislators, to inform every aspect of the new portal and its future.
Fatima Irfan is a recent graduate of Wellesley College where she studied Data Science. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology assisting with the No Tow project, which aims to help Boston residents receive appropriate guidance about street cleaning and car towing. She provided user insight and answered questions throughout the design consultation process.
Geunhee Lee is a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied Urban Studies and Planning. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology to understand immigrant communities' information connection behavior and information needs for their longer establishment. | Presentation
Hailee Hove is a recent graduate of San Diego City College where she studied Graphic Design & Interaction Design. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology on an icon system for the Boston 311 App. | Presentation
Hannah Chu is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Linguistics. This summer, she worked at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. Her project aimed to create a web portal for constituents of the City of San José to view public San José Police Department (SJPD) records. The goal was to increase transparency and build community trust by improving SJPD compliance with SB 1421, California's Right to Know Act.
Hugo Salas is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, he worked at the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team leveraging 311 data from the City of Boston to understand the dynamics of citizens' demands before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, using the text of each requests' description, he used Natural Language Processing to categorize each case into a topic that could easily be streamlined into a department. | Presentation
Hunter Thompson is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago where he studied Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity utilizing workforce data for New York City to create a data story for the about to be released workforce data portal. This data story explored how equitable job placements were around New York City. | Presentation
Irene Tang is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Linguistics. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Data team. Following the City’s 2021 migration of procurement data into a Salesforce database, her team assessed the City’s social equitability in choosing business partners--the first attempt to do so in over 20 years! Critically, they found that disadvantaged-owned, minority-owned, and women-owned enterprises tended to win lower-value contracts. They also found that the City contracts with a lot of businesses headquartered outside LA County (and even outside California) -- but this was justified because for many industries in which the City needs work done, there were not enough local businesses that specialize in that industry. | Presentation
Ivy Li is a recent graduate of Yale University where she studied Architecture (Design). This summer, she worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget designing a completely new performance measures portal used by the Utah government and soon to be open to the public.
Janet Chu is a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati studying Professional Writing and Data Analytics. This summer, she worked with the City of Austin’s Data & Technology Services, Austin Transportation conducting user research to identify target users and prioritize product features for the Mobility Project Viewer, a public-facing dashboard that serves as a one-stop-shop to view all ongoing mobility-related projects citywide. This was accomplished through secondary research, 1:1 stakeholder interviews, and ideation workshops. | Presentation
Jasen Lo is a recent graduate of Minerva Schools at KGI where he studied Data Science. This summer, he worked on multiple projects at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI). He worked on the MOTI communications team on various partner projects to feature the work that MOTI is doing. He also worked on data engineering projects for the San José 311 non-emergency hotline application ticket analysis pipeline. Additionally, he worked on the opportunity housing impact assessment. | Presentation
Joey Headley is a recent graduate of Williams College where he studied Physics. This summer, he worked on a project with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team which involved replicating the logic and functionality of a web app made for the City of Boston called the RentSmart App into a Tableau dashboard. The purpose of the RentSmart dashboard is to enable users to search for any residential property in Boston available to rent and display all the violations associated with that property within the past 3 years. Over the course of his project he leveraged PostgreSQL to format the data into a form suitable for Tableau data analysis and carried out multiple forms of data visualization and analysis in Tableau to create the new dashboard. | Presentation
Jorge Gabitto is a recent graduate of Code the Dream Bootcamp where he studied Full Stack development. This summer, he worked at the City of Austin's Data & Technology Services, Austin Transportation. He worked on migrating the department’s website from create react app to Next.js. Next.js is a React framework that allows react pages to be rendered server side which allows for better performance, load times, and improvements in SEO. | Presentation
Juliyen Davis is a graduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Transdisciplinary Design. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics conducting a review of the Recovery Data Partnership. He interviewed users to understand how MODA could improve agencies' experience with data products.
Kara Siegel is a rising sophomore at Harvard University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer on a feedback module that can be placed at the bottom of any NYC government sites so that users can easily share feedback about their experience on the site. All information will automatically be parsed via Microsoft Flow so that site administrators can view the information via a spreadsheet or an email. | Presentation
Karen Chen is a rising senior at Harvard University studying History of Art and Architecture (Design Studies). This summer, she worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office on The Streetscapes for Wellness interactive which is a proof of concept for making static drawings more engaging for the general public. It features camera animations and scene navigation to allow viewers a more in-depth and exploratory way to understand visuals, supplemented with text to create a narrative. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)
Kevin Zhou is a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Miami’s Department of Innovation and Technology.
Lucas Gelfond is a rising sophomore at Brown University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office on an interactive viewer to explore and move through the 3D version of the Department of City Planning's Dimensions of the City project. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)
Maha Hussain is a rising senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Statistics with Business and Spanish minors. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Innovation Team (i-team) on packaging and cleaning data, and building maps. The culmination of her work was a vaccine outreach helper displaying all of the vaccine, case, mortality, and testing data and resources regarding COVID-19 in one place.
Maita Conchita Navarro is a rising senior at Wellesley College studying Media Arts & Sciences, a combination of Computer Science, Studio Art, and Art History courses. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New Jersey Office of Innovation. She contributed to improving the experience of prospective small business owners through the Business First Stop initiative. | Presentation
Mariana Haro is a rising junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science and Government. This summer, she worked on a project at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology that consisted of taking design components from the City's website to add them to their design system for easy future use.
Maria Milosh is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Regional Planning team on housing data in the NYC region. She collected housing data from various sources and conducted visualization and analysis of housing activity that has taken place over the last 40 years. | Presentation
Marisa Weidner is a graduate student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. This summer, she worked at the State of California’s Office of Digital Innovation as a product manager for the development and launch of an MVP feature for the California Cannabis site. The feature is a campaign toolkit for media assets for California Cannabis campaigns that will improve the user experience and increase downloads of media content. | Presentation 1 | Presentation 2
Matt Crittenden is a recent graduate of William & Mary where he studied International Relations and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Data Engineering Team piloting a data ecosystem using Google Cloud Platform to enhance access, collaboration, and analysis when working with data at NYC Planning. Cloud-based tools will provide storage and processing capabilities which exceed existing data infrastructure at the agency. | Presentation
Max Kwass-Mason is an incoming graduate student at Columbia University where he will study Computer Science and History.
Megan Demit is a graduate student at Maryland Institute College of Art studying UX Design. This summer, she worked with the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology’s Digital Team. She helped build a cloud-based design system for designers, developers, and partners working on projects for the City of Boston. This project built upon previous work the City had done creating a patterns library for UI developers, and will continue to evolve to improve design to development handoffs. | Presentation
Michelle Liu is a rising sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, studying Information Systems and Computer Science. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, developing an embeddable feedback module widget that enables user research and feedback processes across NYC agency websites. | Presentation
Miriam Shamash is a rising junior at Tufts University studying Computer Science & Engineering Psychology.
Regina Joy Alcazar is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where she studied Urban Planning. This summer, she worked on a project that addresses the ongoing eviction crisis in the City of Los Angeles by evaluating the effectiveness of the early financial distribution of the COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) to provide policy and data analysis recommendations for future program implementation. As of August 2021, the preliminary evaluation of the allocation of ERAP funds, designed a framework for understanding who accessed the application to apply for rental assistance, and identify neighborhoods where ERAP relief was still needed.
Renoj Varghese is a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut where he studied Digital Media & Design. This summer, designed digital and print products to communicate transportation policy to land developers and consultants at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology. He created and tested a prototype that allowed land developers and consultants to submit their strategies to meet Boston’s transportation standards. | Presentation
Rudransh Dikshit is a rising junior at Texas A&M University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office to design a REST-API to track sun position data and helped design an algorithm to calculate the roof pitch of buildings in New York and assess for solar potential. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)
Ryan Bushman is a senior at Utah State University studying Statistics. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene’s Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness, creating numerous data visualization tools using Tableau. The intent of the project was to assess the performance of the agency’s By My Side Birth Support Program over time. The project is accompanied by a user guide for those unfamiliar with the software. He also conducted a quality-control analysis of the data collected by the program.
Saiful Islam is a rising senior at The City College of New York studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer on the LPaaS 2.0 which stands for Landing Page as a Service. It will be used by NYC agency representatives to spin off their own landing pages for their new services, documents, or other ideas they wish to release to the public. Through this project, content editing is made easier and money is saved. | Presentation
Sandra Zavala is an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science and Applied Mathematics. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Mayor's Data Team and contributed data analysis for the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Analysis. She also worked on evaluating the Los Angeles Emergency Rental Assistance Program's first phase by using an index to measure the allocation of financial distribution.
Silky Agrawal is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she worked with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team. The City of Boston recognizes the importance of data quality checks for its datasets published for public use. Any non-standard and unautomated checks lead to delayed knowledge of such data quality issues amongst stakeholders. Therefore, the team wanted to have an automated data quality check process embedded in their workflow which would directly inform stakeholders of data quality issues, if any and take immediate corrective measures before the data is released to the public. Silky worked on creating a pipeline that helped automate data quality checks for one of the datasets for the Department of Inspection Services. | Presentation
Spencer Simon is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Data Analytics. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Data Engineering Team on improving data access and usability using Google Cloud Platform to build out an enhanced data ecosystem for the agency. He demonstrated this enhanced data ecosystem in action by analyzing the impact of zoning changes on the built environment in New York City. | Presentation
Starasia Wright is a recent graduate from CUNY Hunter College with a double Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science and English with a Linguistics and Rhetoric Concentration. This summer, she worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget creating and populating the database for a new performance measures portal used by the Utah government.
Yoseph Ghazal is a rising senior at the University of California, Irvine studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics adding a new set of documentation to assist the tech team with understanding their data sets and pipelines. He created tracking sheets and pipeline diagrams throughout his 10 weeks.
Yvonne Tram is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California where she studied Business Administration and Applied Analytics. This summer, she worked at San José’s Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. Opportunity Housing refers to enabling multi-unit housing on properties with a Residential Neighborhood General Plan land use designation. It explores allowing up to four units per parcel (for example, a mix of a single-family home, duplex, triplex, or fourplex. esidents based on properties within a ½ mile radius from transit versus those citywide. Her project entailed an impact assessment on the housing, renting, and lot size situation of current residents based on properties within a ½ mile radius from transit versus those citywide. | Presentation
Please contact [email protected] with any questions.