Data students visit UN World Data Forum

The iLab students came armed with practical skills across leading platforms and a strong understanding of the pros and cons of the different applications. We were able to bring our vision to life and have full confidence in our chosen approach, having been able to investigate different options made possible through the flexibility of the iLab process without usual commercial restraints. The students exceeded our expectations and were an absolute delight to work with, professional and passionate every step of the way." Georgina Camp, Director Huber Social.

In 2018 two MDSi students, Vanessa Bhardwaj and Simon (Kin Wah) Mac undertook an iLab project as part of their Master of Data Science and Innovation program. The iLabs, which run with selected industry partners from August through to October present students with a data set and a set of outcomes or questions to work with an industry partner on. Vanessa and Simon worked with Huber Social, where they were asked to present data sets with two main goals:

1. To inform organisational level decision making (an Organisation’s view of their impact and the needs of the people they work with).
2. To inform community, national and global decision making (a Community and Global view of levels of Wellbeing and priority of needs across different sectors).

Come September, we were contacted by Georgina, Director of Huber Social to say that they were "absolutely thrilled" with the ‘Global Wellbeing Data Centre’ prototype the students had built, and they were going to showcase it at the UN World Forum in Dubai! As the co-creators, they wanted to take the students to the forum and Vanessa and Simon went to UAE (20–25 October) attended the Forum (22–24) with Huber Social.

 "The experience was truly amazing. I had the best time at the UN conference… because of all the new things I was learning. We had a booth for Huber social…delegates from around the world would come and ask us questions about the organisation and what we were doing… We would start with global view by telling the delegates that these are the places where Huber Social currently has their data centres and then we would transition to one of the three dashboards I created to tell them how it works on a granular level and could be potentially used to go deeper to find out the wellbeing of an individual. It would also tell them if the wellbeing was positive or negative, the driving factors of the wellbeing and what factors to direct resources towards to improve the current stage.

It was amazing to see what sort of data was collected globally and there were exchange of ideas about how these datasets could be potentially merged with the data Huber social was collecting. So very interesting in terms of Data!" Vanessa Bhardwaj, MDSi student.