Data Science Focus: sustainability and climate change

Roux/Khoury faculty are implementing a focus on sustainability and climate change.

We’re proposing a disciplinary focus for MSDS students that spans the entire student experience, from Align to capstone. The goal is to make our graduates attractive to businesses and organizations looking for DS expertise in a world that requires sustainable adaptation to climate change. The focus will give our students an advantage if they want to pursue internships, co-ops or future employment in related areas. To get there, we’ll blend disciplinary case studies into the entire DS course curriculum without modifying learning objectives or course charters.

For example, coastal and inland flooding (measurable with satellite imagery and time series of coastal water level) can motivate processing and visualization of large spatial datasets in DS5010 and DS5110, application of Markov chains in DS5020 and DS5220, and image segmentation in DS5230 and CS5330. The novelty here is that the Roux/Khoury faculty will collaborate in order to identify case studies and datasets from the various climate-change and sustainability sciences. These will motivate and coordinate the topics we already teach. We don’t envision any new courses or administrative burden for this focus, only enhanced communication and collaboration among participating faculty. DS course charters provide for this type of flexibility, and the interdisciplinary foundations of data science set the stage.

Projects, assignments and lecture topics will be scoped and organized by participating faculty. Stakeholders from partnering organizations will help motivate the scientific focus and provide policy context to assure that we’re telling the right “story”. Our partners include a range of non-profits and government organizations.