Partners

Centre for Social and Cultural Data Science

CSCDS is a founding partner of PODS. CSCDS is a community of faculty members, staff, post-doctorates and students committed to combining data science skills with an understanding of culture and society in order to do thoughtful and impactful work – both in research and in the real world.

Max Bell School of Public Policy

The Max Bell School of Public Policy is a founding member of PODS. The school is committed to the research, teaching, public outreach, and practical advocacy of sound public policy.

Sponsors

Business Development Bank of Canada

BDC is a generous founding sponsor of the program. In 2019, BDC hosted fellow Garima Karia where she worked on a project on tech innovation in Canada.

BCF Avocats d'Affaires

BCF is a generous sponsor of the program.

Previous Internship Sites

Institute for Research on Public Policy

The IRPP seeks to improve public policy in Canada by generating research, providing insight and informing debate on current and emerging policy issues facing Canadians and their governments. In 2018, Dexter Docherty worked with data on cannabis black markets in Canada to inform new marijuana legalization policies. In 2019, Kate Marr-Laing completed a project on making projections of the prevalence and incidence of dementia across Canada’s provinces and territories.

Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal

CIUSSS provides the province of Quebec with local, integrated and accessible health and social services. In 2019, Tamara Jacod analyzed the distribution inequalities of food programs in primary schools in the greater Montreal area.

The Conference Board of Canada/Institut du Quebéc

The Conference Board of Canada and the Institut du Quebéc is working to improve public policy in Quebec. In 2018, Olivier Xie Cheng Li used data on Canadian patents as a proxy for analyzing innovation in the region. In 2019, Madeleine Nicoloff created a map in order to visualize census data from the 1986 and 2016 censuses, aiming to understand socioeconomic mobility.

Ajah

Ajah is a technology social enterprise that builds tools and services for the nonprofit sector. In 2019, Sara Mohammadi interned with Ajah, where she worked on a network analysis of donors and recipients of funds in the non-profit sector.

Data Sciences Inc.

Data Sciences brings together art and science to understand how audiences behave and predict how to best engage them. In 2018, Emily Xing worked with Facebook marketing data. Her project focused on automating the extraction of data and creating business logic to automate decision making for campaigns. In 2019, Saeesh Mangwani developed an automated person-matching algorithm that accurately identifies matching and duplicate records between datasets.

Montreal Urban Innovation Lab

Created in May 2018, the Urban Innovation Lab’s mission is to foster and support the emergence of innovative solutions to major urban challenges. In 2018, Marine Colon de Franciosi worked with datasets related to the recent Open Data Policy.

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McGill Observatory on Health and Social Services Reforms

The goal of MOHSSR is to offer a hub for health services research and training at McGill, and to serve as a platform to improve knowledge exchange and public understanding of health and social services reforms. In 2018, Aliya Allen-Valley explored data on Long Term Care policy options in Canada. In 2019, Béatrice Libchaber worked on a project using public provincial data to analyze the relationships between specific policies and doctor involvement with the Quebec government health insurance board.

Nexalogy

Nexalogy Environics is a data science consulting agency. During PODS 2018, Emma Ebowe interned at Nexalogy Environics, where she worked with data pulled from Twitter to inform policy surrounding white supremacy movements.

Open North

Open North works with a wide diversity of innovative and connected public administrations and community stakeholders to build their efficient, ethical, and collaborative use of data and technology to solve complex problems. In 2019, Martin Law Martin interned at the Applied Research Lab within Open North, where he conducted analyses on open data quality in specific local contexts to provide metrics for measuring success of open smart cities.

Plot.ly

Plotly is a data science and AI company focused on ​taking data science out of the lab and into the business.​ In 2019, Koji Shiromoto created visualizations on a wide variety of datasets, for use in the documentation for its ggplotly package.

Prospered Project Research Group

Prospered Project is a research group hosted at the Institute for Health and Social Policy. Prospered researchers have built databases summarizing national laws and policies across most countries worldwide in twelve policy areas. In 2018, Juliette Deshormes analyzed the coverage of India's Integrated Child Development Scheme. In 2019, Tamara Yang analyzed the socioeconomic determinants of sterilization practices from the Annual Indian Health Survey.

Precision Analytics

Precision Analytics is a a boutique provider of health and life science-related data analytics solutions. In 2019, Precision Analytics hosted Camille Préel-Dumas where she analyzed demographic data to help medical schools reach more underrepresented groups and increase diversity within health care education.