The Civic Digital Fellowship is the first of its kind data science and technology internship program for innovative students to solve pressing problems in federal agencies. Summer 2020 marked our first-ever virtual iteration of the Fellowship due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We are grateful for our six agency partners who worked to make this summer a success despite the circumstances: the U.S. Census Bureau, General Services Administration, Internal Revenue Service, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Civic Digital Fellowship also wouldn't be possible without support from our generous supporters: Schmidt Futures, the Ford Foundation, and the Knight Foundation.
Meet the fourth, and first-ever virtual, cohort of Civic Digital Fellows: Introducing the 2020 Civic Digital Fellows.
This repository features the slides that Fellows presented during their respective end-of-summer presentations at their host agencies. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s virtual end-of-summer celebration, with keynote remarks from Todd Park and Megan Smith, two former U.S. Chief Technology Officers.
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available.
Muhammad Asghar is a recent graduate of CUNY Lehman College where he studied Computer Science and Math. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau converting incoming call data from audio to text, using natural language processing to understand respondents’ most frequently asked questions.
Sophie Bair is a rising senior at Columbia University studying Statistics & Neuroscience. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration to help with the rehaul of GEAR, an internal site that allows GSA to understand how its business applications, technologies, and capabilities are connected in order to create a more efficient organization, by creating visualizations, updating structures, and automating email reminders.
Gayatri Balasubramanian is a rising senior at Harvard College studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on a tool that will improve the reporting process for Equal Employment Opportunity offices and related affirmative action reports. | Presentation
Justin Bao is a rising junior at the University of Washington studying Computer Science and Biomedical & Health Informatics. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the dashboard for the Disclosure Avoidance System, creating a central hub for information to monitor, maintain, and develop the system for ensuring data privacy in Census data.
Will Beddow is a rising junior at Carleton College studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration on the login.gov team on its encryption modules and standards, building out, testing, and integrating new cryptographic schemes in the process.
Nick Blake is a rising junior at Washington University in St. Louis studying Psychological & Brain Sciences. This summer, he worked as part of the Global Interview team at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services alongside designers and engineers to develop an app for Asylum Officers to use during their interviews with applicants seeking asylum, including a “Country of Origin” feature.
Dylan Bragdon is a recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego where he studied Cognitive Science. This summer, Dylan helped the U.S. Census Bureau automate processing of user feedback in order to improve data.census.gov using machine learning. | Presentation
Hoaian Dang is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This summer, they worked at the General Services Administration collecting user research regarding GSA’s Software as a Service (SaaS) authorization process and identifying potential solutions to improve both the process and its documentation. | Presentation
Evan DeBroux is a recent graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology where he studied Applied Mathematics & Business. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service to conduct an analysis of the collection notice process to improve payment compliance and reduce taxpayer burden.
Emily (Yong Li) Dich is a recent graduate of Harvard College where she studied Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on a full stack web application for the Survey of Government Research and Development, centralizing data, refining database architecture, and creating a new interface for survey and research analysts. | Presentation
Abhinay Dommalapti is a rising senior at the University of Virginia studying Computer Science and Statistics. This summer, he worked on a machine learning model at the U.S. Census Bureau to predict industry classification codes from economic census data. | Presentation
Evan Dong is a rising junior at Brown University studying Computer Science, Behavioral Decision Sciences, and Institutional Structure and Sustainable Systems. This summer, they worked at the U.S. Census Bureau linking pre-existing datasets within the Bureau to connect geographic, business, employment, and demographic data. | Presentation
Catherine Du is a rising junior at Carnegie Mellon University studying Information Systems. This summer, Catherine worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to create a tool to automate the creation of data snapshots with continuously-updated data within the Census Bureau’s Economic Indicators Division.
Aishani Dutta is a rising sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau with Evan Dong to develop a record linkage and address standardization system to reduce the manual burden involved in identifying matches across data frames, which will result in cost savings by guarding against data errors and discrepancies. They also built a prototype database that consolidates person-level data across multiple sources. | Presentation
Jinsu Elhance is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science with an emphasis in Social Poverty, Health, and Welfare. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service building a classifier for bridge contracts to encourage IRS procurement professionals to follow proper contracting procedures. | Presentation
Natalie Gable is a coterminal Master’s student at Stanford University studying Electrical Engineering. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health to develop an R statistical programming package that leveraged API capacity to interface with PubMed Central, employed natural language processing to represent article content on authors’ data sharing plans, and supplemented the package with a curated suite of illustrative machine learning methods. | Presentation
Alex Gao is an incoming Master’s student at the University of California, Berkeley studying the application of Data Science to Public Policy. This summer, he used machine learning at the U.S. Census Bureau to detect businesses that do not ship any goods as part of an effort to optimize the Census Bureau’s Commodity Flow Survey. This work will lead to significant time and cost savings. | Presentation
Trey Gilliand is a rising junior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Internal Revenue Service analyzing USAspending data and building a machine learning model to predict the award date and procurement administrative lead time (PALT) of open contracts in the IRS system. Trey also explored specifics of zero dollar contracts at IRS to allow Procurement to make better budget and timeline projections. | Presentation
Jordan Graves is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan where she studied Information Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau alongside other Fellows to automate the “snapshot” creation process for economic indicators by collecting data sources in a centralized data space and creating a Python tool.
Andy Green is a Master’s student at Georgetown University studying Data Science for Public Policy. This summer, he worked on building a proof-of-concept extension of the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns data series by integrating revenue data into the existing product; this relied on developing imputation algorithms, outlier detection models, and significant data wrangling. | Presentation
Launa Greer is a rising second-year Master’s student at the University of Chicago where she studies Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she supported the Global Asylum team at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services by helping update and maintain one of their primary web applications, ensuring accessibility, adding functionality, and enabling the display of security check results in the user interface.
Irene Guo is a rising senior at the University of California, San Diego studying Cognitive Science with a specialization in Design and Interaction. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service performing a heuristic evaluation of the IRS’s twenty-two most utilized digital properties against the 21st Century IDEA Act principles and requirements and identifying additional opportunities to improve the customer experience across the IRS’s digital properties. | Presentation
Rohan Gupta is a rising junior at Brown University studying Computer Science and Applied Mathematics-Economics. This summer, Rohan worked on two projects at the U.S. Census Bureau to automate the conversion of PDF files to Excel spreadsheets to support survey respondents, and to produce more specific estimates of the time burden of individual surveys. | Presentation
Kylie Hunter is a rising junior at the University of Colorado, Boulder studying Computer Science, Leadership, and Peace Conflict and Securities. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health with the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), where she conducted a much-needed study on the ethical, legal, and social implications of applying artificial intelligence-related analytic techniques to the field of genomics. She also helped improve the user experience of AnVIL, NHGRI’s new, cloud-based genomics research platform. | Presentation
Jordan Jackson is a rising senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute studying Building Sciences and Design, Innovation, and Society. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service on a rule-based virtual agent that helps customers successfully verify their identity to create an IRS.gov account and access various IRS tools and services.
Ajay Jain is a senior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign studying Statistics & Computer Science and Political Science. This summer, he worked at the Department of Health and Human Services on COVID-19 analytics, designing software to automate the creation of Medicare FFS case and test demographic metrics, and creating COVID-19 random forest and logistic regression machine learning models.
Drishaan Jain is a rising sophomore at the University of Michigan studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on an Economic Census project extending the existing County Business Patterns program, including revenue data in the product that provides subnational firm and establishment data by industry and geography to advise economic and policy decisions. | Presentation
Jennifer John is a rising sophomore at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to develop machine learning and natural language processing models to understand scientific papers on rare disease research, including epidemiology studies. | Presentation
Jared Joseph is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis studying Sociology. This summer he worked at the Internal Revenue Service on a model to categorize incoming referrals to the Tax-Exempt/Government Entities office of the IRS by suspected tax-relevant merit, helping IRS agents prioritize which referrals to consider first.
Marissa Joy is a first-year Master’s student at Georgetown University studying Data Science for Public Policy. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health and created an internal web application that uses natural language processing to help users understand NIH grant details.
Laiba Khan is a rising senior at The Honors College at the University of Houston studying Management Information Systems and Entrepreneurship with an Honors Minor in Leadership Studies. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service helping the Enterprise Systems team transition to Amazon Web Services. | Presentation
Anna Kong is a recent graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology where she studied Computer Science and Data Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop a record linkage system between Commodity Flow Survey and Foreign Trade export declarations, which will improve the data quality of mileage calculations of freight and reduce manual burden on analysts. | Presentation
Meera Kurup is a rising sophomore at Brown University studying Computer Science and Public Policy. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health focusing on data analysis on grants data for the budget team and COVID-19 trials data.
Hannah Leland is a rising junior at Illinois Institute of Technology studying Information Technology and Management. This summer, she worked at the Internal Revenue Service developing the Secure Access and Digital Identity (SADI) project for the IRS website to make it easier and safer for taxpayers to access their records online, making the tax system more secure, user-friendly, and easier to maintain and improve.
Tiffany Liu is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Symbolic Systems and English. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration on a crowdsourcing challenge to streamline the legal contract review process, specifically exploring a user interface to review end-user license agreements (EULA) to identify clauses and/or terms that are unacceptable to the government, reducing the time and effort necessary to review contracts within GSA.
Amy Lo is a rising sophomore at Stanford University studying Product Design Engineering and Psychology. This summer, she worked on two projects at the U.S. Census Bureau—redesigning Census Academy with an improved UI/UX and developing Data Challenges, an interactive learning feature targeted towards small business owners. | Presentation
Rohan Narain is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Statistics and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health to create an internal web application for users to get more out of their data by enabling them to summarize NIH grant applications, allowing non-technical users to interface with grant applications and to assist in the existing categorization processes.
Mina Narayanan is a first-year Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Public Policy and Management. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health performing topic modeling analyses on research grants within the National Institute of Nursing Research. | Presentation
Angel Nugroho is a rising junior at Cornell University studying Information Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health with the NCATS Office of Rare Disease Research on a diagnostic support system that suggests potential rare diseases after receiving an input of symptoms. | Presentation
Isabeau Rea is a senior at the University of Maryland studying Information Science, specializing in Data Science. This summer, they worked at the National Institutes of Health to harness topic modeling techniques, using supercomputer-aided unsupervised machine learning algorithms for natural language processing, to predict emerging fields of research within grant proposals submitted to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).
Matthew Rose is a rising senior at Duke University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to build a web app with Django to help Census Bureau analysts make batch fixes on Commodity Flow Survey data, helping automate the process and saving time for Census analysts. | Presentation
Joshua Schmidt is a rising senior at Stevens Institute of Technology studying Computer Engineering. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau within the Research and Methodology directorate supporting projects related to disclosure avoidance and differential privacy for 2020 Census data.
Daniel Schnelbach is a first-year Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Public Policy and Management. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop a program that automates statistical report generation for criminal justice agencies that provide data to the Census Bureau’s Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS). | Presentation
Jessie (Jaspreet) Singh is a rising senior at the University of Michigan studying Computer Science and Business. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) on a data-sharing platform that enables scientists to access de-identified data from NICHD-funded studies for secondary analysis, rather than collecting their own data. | Presentation
Eric Son is a first-year Master’s student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health creating and integrating database models into a web application to display energy consumption data for the Central Utility Plant. | Presentation
Jared Stancombe is a recent graduate of Indiana University where he studied Cybersecurity Risk Management as a Master’s student. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health on a few resources for information system security officers at NIH institutes and centers using the MITRE ATT&CK framework to identify potential threat actors in the assessment and authorization processes for NIH systems. | Presentation
Eliot Stanton is a rising senior at Simmons University studying Data Science. This summer they worked with two other Fellows to automate the creation of internal summary “snapshots” for each Economic Indicator produced at the Census Bureau, allowing teams to focus on data analysis rather than data lookup and entry.
Nithi Subbaian is a recent graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she studied Electrical and Computer Engineering. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration to redesign the Data to Decisions website to fit the United States Web Design System and to plan the website’s transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, allowing GSA to respond more quickly and nimbly to customer needs. | Presentation
Prasiddha Sudhakar is a rising junior at Rutgers University-New Brunswick studying Computer Science and Economics. This summer, she worked at the Department of Health and Human Services building a React application using React and Node.js that uses the Data.gov CMS API to retrieve and display a patient’s personal information.
Abdulrahim Tahlil is a rising senior at Boston University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration migrating the 18F website to the latest version of the United States Web Design System and improving accessibility testing as part of 18F’s goal to meet GSA and 21st Century IDEA guidelines.
Elijah Tai is a rising junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau analyzing feedback on data.census.gov using machine learning. | Presentation
Derek Tam is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he studied Systems Engineering. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration building out features on vote.gov to provide correct, unbiased information in anticipation of the federal election to help users register to vote. | Presentation
Tia Thomson is a recent graduate of Northeastern University where she studied Design. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to help facilitate The Opportunity Project, which brings together technologists, government, and communities to rapidly prototype digital products that are powered by federal open data and that solve real-world problems for people across the country. She also helped plan and execute virtual workshops that utilized design thinking to bring together participants and ground their work in human-centered design and community needs. | Presentation
Elliott Tran is a first-year Master’s student at Columbia University studying Quantitative Methods and Public Administration. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to implement Bayesian A/B testing for email marketing and to increase interactive learning on Census Academy, conducting user research with small business owners. | Presentation (A/B Testing) and Presentation (Census Academy)
Ashton Tu is a rising senior at the University of Southern California studying Media Arts and Practice. This summer, she worked at the General Service Administration’s Office of Customer Experience to develop insights about the hiring manager experience and improve the end-to-end hiring manager process. She also designed a pitch deck for the incoming GSA Chief Customer Officer about the history and workflow of OCE. | Presentation
Varsha Vaidyanath is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science and Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to analyze Human Resource data and develop data visualizations to support better resource allocation and management.
Annie Wang is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the National Institutes of Health as part of the NIH STRIDES Initiative to design a visual identity and online resource hub to support members of the research community in using the cloud for research. | Presentation
Anthony Xiang is a rising junior at Stony Brook University majoring in Statistics and Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop natural language processing for address matching of the 1990 decennial census to up-to-date records, enabling researchers to link important datasets across several decades. | Presentation
Chris Yang is a rising sophomore at Duke University studying Computer Science and Statistics. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health developing a natural language processing and machine learning chatbot using Microsoft Azure tools to help users identify relevant resources and points of contact.
Angela Yoo is a rising senior at Yale University studying Cognitive Science. This summer, she worked at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Refugee Affairs Division to help design a digital case management system to centralize and streamline key features of the refugee adjudication process, focusing on automating processes for refugee officers.
Anna Zhang is a rising sophomore at Yale University studying Computing and the Arts. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration on Code.gov’s integration with United States Web Design System 2.0 to improve the site’s user experience and consistency, as well as in making Code.gov mobile-friendly and accessible for individuals with disabilities, in accordance with Section 508. | Presentation
Bob Zhao is a rising senior at Washington University in St. Louis studying Economics and Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the National Institutes of Health as part of the NIH STRIDES Initiative to develop a web strategy and implementation, which will help NIH researchers to do research at an unprecedented scale by slashing compute times from weeks to hours. | Presentation
Please contact fellowship@codingitforward.com with any questions.