Almost 200 people joined data scientists from around the world to celebrate Women in Data Science (WiDS) March 4. Local events were organized in more than 150 regions, one of which was sponsored by the ASA and held in the DC-Virginia-Maryland area.

Amanda Traud and Donna LaLonde serve as Women in Data Science ambassadors for the DC-VA-MD event.
Photo by Wendy Martinez

The regional event started with workshops on GitHub, R Shiny, statistical learning methods, and ethics in data science, which were followed by the keynote talks streamed from the main WiDS event. The agenda was filled out by including two sessions of ignite talks, where attendees gave a 3–5-minute talk sharing information about projects they are involved in, interesting career ideas and trajectories, and resources for data scientists.

The conference issued a data challenge to WiDS attendees and others who want to have fun analyzing a data set and possibly make important contributions to social good. The data set to be used contains breast cancer mortality data and can be downloaded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read instructions for registering for the data challenge and downloading the data.

Contestants must register for the challenge by June 1 and will present their results September 13, either remotely or in person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Judging will take place at that time.