Focus Areas

DSI has five focus areas: Business and Finance, Climate, Foundations of Data Science, Health Care, and Social Justice.

• A focus on Business and Finance recognizes the importance of this sector in New York City and

Columbia’s leading expertise in this area across Arts and Sciences, Business, and Engineering. • A focus in Climate recognizes the explosion of data generated by scientific devices and instrumentation, and the opportunity to push not only data-driven climate science, but also data-driven climate policy and law. • Foundations of Data Science represents the interests of a large fraction of DSI members and affiliates and supports the first part of DSI’s mission statement: to advance the state-of-the-art in data science. • A focus in Health Care recognizes the unbounded growth of data generated in biology, health, medicine, and neuroscience from the protein-level to the population-level and the opportunity provided by Columbia’s excellent medical center to use more advanced data science methods. • Social Justice represents both the need to address fairness, responsibility, and ethics in the use of data science tools that are used to make decisions about people and the lack of diversity in the data science community.