Data Science for Social Good 2019 Summer Fellowship
21 Nov 2021In the summer of 2019, I had the privilege to join the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) 2019 Fellowship. Along with 18 other fellows at Imperial College London and 19 fellows at Warwick University, we received training in data science, big data, machine learning, data ethics, but also “softer” skills such as communication and project scoping. In groups of 4 fellows guided by a project manager and a technical mentor, we worked on real-life projects for charity partners or public organisations.
My team had the honour of working with BarefootLaw, a Ugandan NGO that provides free legal guidance to anyone through social media, phone calls, SMS, outreach activities, radio broadcasts and more. Our aim was to help them speed up their drafting process when answering questions received through written channels.
During these 12 weeks, we successfully developed a system based on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval to provide lawyers with a faster way of drafting their responses. This system was deployed in our partner’s work platform and is being used by the organisation. You’ll find more information on this project in the poster below, and our repository is open-sourced at this address.
