Coordinated through the Coding it Forward Civic Digital Fellowship program, I spent 3 months in the Internal Revenue Service building a model development system. The final goal was to categorize incoming referrals to the Tax-Exempt/Government Entities office of the IRS by suspected tax-relevant merit. These categorizations help IRS agents prioritize which referrals to inspect first, reducing the time it takes for the most serious fraud concerns to be investigated. …
I spent 3 months in the UK working with Ofsted through the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship, hosted by The Alan Turing Institute and The University of Warwick. Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, a non-ministerial department of the UK government. Ofsted is responsible for the inspection of services providing education and skills for learners, as well as inspection and regulation of services that care for children and young people. …
During an event hosted by the UC Davis Data Science Initiative a partner and I chose to visualize Proposition 11, which deregulated emergency medical personnel and their break time. Our research uncovered that the proposition was entirely funded by American Medical Response (AMR), the largest private ambulance service in the area. I scraped several tweets regarding Proposition 11, including those which used clearly aligned tags like #YesOn11 or #NoOn11. …
During the 2018 Santa Fe Institute Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science, I had the opportunity to work with a partner, Jeff Jacobs, on a challenge from the Etherium Foundation. We modeled how information and trust flows within a network, and applied this to a co-authorship network. We simulated networks to test how the network structure would change if co-authors were more willing to author outside their area of expertise, and their own level of generalized “talent.” …
