Hack4Good

It all started over a late-night cup of coffee during the winter break, when Laetitia Vionnet and I met to ponder about how our student clubs might cooperate to create a vibrant community around the topic of data science at ETH Zurich. Amidst cinnamon spice and Christmas cookies, we fantasized about the positive impact students could have, if only we could put the cutting-edge skills we learn here at the university toward some of humanity's most pressing challenges. I left the meeting with the midnight bus, excited about the idea of hosting a Hack-a-thon-style program. A program that would allow students to learn by working on practical and impactful data science problems. I never anticipated that our initial excitement would conspire with so many small coincidences to bring this dream to fruition.

Inspired by the initial idea, “Hack4Good” became a natural conversation piece in my social interactions. Funnily enough, one of the students with whom I talked about the idea remembered sharing a ride with a woman – Eliora Henzler - who worked as a data scientist at the NGO IMPACT Initiatives. IMPACT is essentially a `Data science squad` in the humanitarian sector. Via their reports they inform a third of the global humanitarian spending. The student shared Eliora’s email address with us, and soon after, IMPACT became the first NGO partner of Hack4Good. Another magical coincidence was our encounter with Barbara La Cara, who happened to be working on building up the Social Innovation Lab at the ETH Student Project House at that time. After hearing the initial idea, she directly joined our organizational committee to support us with her experience and some funding allocated to the Social Innovation Lab.

In mid-April, only four months after the initial coffee cup, the first Hack4Good kicked-off with an amazingly diverse group of 15 participants from 10 nationalities and 7 different departments within ETH Zurich. Our NGO partner IMPACT Initiatives presented us with the challenge of predicting the need-profiles (MSNA) of people in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in north-east Nigeria. This crisis affects over 7 million people and is one of the largest humanitarian crises today. The United Nations defines “need-categories” by, for example, “Wash,” “Education,” or “Shelter.” Accurate need-profiles within these categories help inform evidence-based humanitarian aid and support efficient disaster relief.

Over the course of 5 weeks, our participants worked in their free time alongside their lectures to move their projects further along. In accordance with the two pillars of Hack4Good - learning and true impact - the students were supported in their work by an ecosystem of workshops, team-work sessions, and weekly office-hour calls with data scientists from IMPACT. In the first week, for example, we offered students a workshop on Agile Project Management with professionals, who donated their time in support of Hack4Good. In the workshop, we learned of the importance of iterative prototyping and using the office-hours in the program to check back with the “project holder” (in our case IMPACT) if the thought-of solution is actually valuable to them.

This questionnaire-algorithm proposes questions that are based on the respondent’s answers to previous questions. In doing so, it in principle allows to speed up the data collection process by up to a factor of two. Had you asked me five months ago whether a simple idea conceived over a coffee could become a reality so quickly, I would not have imagined it would be possible. Thanks to the amazing support of ETH Zurich and IMPACT Initiatives, as well as the personal drive of all the people involved, I have been convinced otherwise. Maybe drinking coffee can indeed help humanity.

Simon Mathis is a Master’s degree seeking student in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich. He is currently working on his thesis - a joint project between the group of Prof. Renato Renner and IBM Research in Zurich. Simon became interested in data science during his exchange in Tokyo and co-founded the Analytics Club at ETH.

Laetitia Vionnet is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. She holds a MSc in physics and a minor in Contemporary Asian Studies from EPFL. Apart from her studies, she has been initiating and working on projects that aimed at facilitating exchanges between Swiss institutions and external partners. Her interest in data science grew naturally at ETH. At the Graduate Consulting Club, she initiated a data science branch to reflect the evolution of the consulting industry.

Dr Barbara La Cara is the Lead of the Social Innovation Lab at the ETH Student Project House. She holds a PhD in Social Innovation and Business Ethics by ETH Zurich and has experience in mentoring early-stage social innovation teams. At ETH Zurich, she also leads the ETH Talent project, an initiative of the ETH Rector aiming to foster ETH graduates' employment and engagement in society.