I appreciate what you guys are trying to do but I can't seen many mathematicians or statisticians applying for this unless you provide a little more information about what these "hard" problems are.<p>Honestly it reads like your offering basic in training in a a random selection of tools and then hoping some non profits present a problem with nice clean data that can be solved through application of a few methods from scikit.learn.<p>If you wan't to attract math people my suggestion would be to identify a few intriguing and hard problems a head of time and taking applications specifically for them...you can always suggest a change if you think an applicant would be better suited to a different one. Providing intriguing problems that might match up with peoples pre existing research interests is key...there is lots of room for cross pollination and growth but a bayesian statistician is going to be much more intrigued by something that might benefit from a hierarchical model then something that needs ODE's or online convex optimization.<p>Worse 4-6 months might not even be enough time to formulate a problem that needs a solution and get the required data in place. Non profits are generally extremely overworked and take a long time to do things. They will not have their data in anything resembling a database or standardized format...think short hand notes in word files if you're lucky. Identifying people and data you can work with on this end a head of time is key.<p>For the record I work for a non profit analyzing complex diseases and my background is in math. I've also sat on the board of and been involved in a few other non profits.
To get more exposure, consider posting the fellowship to these subreddits:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/datascience" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/datascience</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning/</a><p>If you have not already, I would recommend reaching out to these companies to sponsor: Cloudera, Palantir, New Relic, Tableau, Domo.
This is an awesome initiative. It's good to see an organization using and promoting data science for something other than "optimizing click ads." Kick some ass guys!
Always glad to see these skills put to uses besides selling products and eyeballs!<p>Here's another fellowship using data science towards non-commercial goals (global health research): <a href="http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/fellowships" rel="nofollow">http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/fellowships</a><p>Full disclosure: I participated in the fellowship in 2008.
I have a vehicle routing solution (minimal routes via multiple destinations, with time windows, capacity constraints, weekly scheduling; it's a website service on top of Google Maps) that I would be happy to provide for free to social impact projects. Email is in my profile if you're interested.
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For those who think this is an awesome idea, but that don't want to relocate and/or work full-time, I recommend you check out the similarly minded <a href="http://www.datakind.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datakind.org/</a>
Can you elaborate on what a "Fully funded fellowship" means? I'm guess it's vague because you haven't figured out how much support you'll be able to provide yet?