Jake Porway - Data Scientists at Work - page 308

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Jake Porway
DataKind
Jake Porway is the Founder and Executive Director of DataKind, a nonprofit
dedicated to using data science to tackle the world's biggest problems. DataKind
convenes data scientists to help mission-driven organizations such as the World
Bank, Sunlight Foundation, Grameen Foundation, Amnesty International USA, and
the United Nations Global Pulse address their biggest data challenges. With an
unparalleled team and advisory board, DataKind is taking the nonprofit world by
storm. Supporters of DataKind and its mission include The Knight Foundation,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Blue Ridge Foundation, Teradata, Cloudera, Informatica,
and thousands of data scientists who donate their time and skills to DataKind
projects to help make the world a better place. With the launch of its latest wave of
local chapters in mid-2014, DataKind is poised to help even more NGOs and other
mission-driven organizations improve their data literacy and data capacity, as well
as assessing how data science can help them better serve humanity. Match-making
data scientists with cause-driven work and applying data science to unconventional
datasets generate interesting and diverse challenges.
Porway's career before DataKind included internships at Bell Laboratories and
Google, where he designed and implemented statistical models and algorithms for
event detection and the identification of anomalous behavior. He went on to do his
PhD at the UCLA Center for Image andVision Sciences, where he not only conducted
his own research, but also coordinated a team spread across the US and China to
integrate his code and research into a unified software system. Porway then did a
stint at Utopia Compression Corporation—helping the company improve machine
autonomy and convert large amounts of image data into usable knowledge— before
joining The New York Times , where he was a data scientist in the research and
development lab, building prototypes for the future of media.