IBM Fellow Saska Mojsilovic, Ph.D., led the creation of the Ebola Open Data Jam in 2014. A community effort which helped to identify, inventory and classify all open data sources related to the Ebola outbreak, it provided governments, aid agencies and researchers with free and open access to valuable open data related to Ebola. Fellow IBM Researcher Kush Varshney, Ph.D., is also a data ambassador for Data Kind, an organization that brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations to better collect, analyze, and visualize data in the service of humanity. His collaborations include GiveDirectly, a program that delivers cash directly to extremely poor villagers in Kenya and Uganda.
IBM Research scientists Raya Horesh (standing, far left), Dennis Wei (standing, center), Kush Varshney (sitting, right), and Saška Mojsilović (far right) with data science community members at the second Ebola Open Data Jam in 2015.
Together, these dedicated researchers and humanitarians spearheaded the IBM Social Good Fellowship Program. This new initiative invites graduate and post-doctoral students to apply their computer science and analytical skills to pre-identified projects that seek to address an important social issue such as health care, women’s empowerment, the environment, sustainability, disaster response and more.