Program Goal:
Increase the Readiness of Health Equity Researchers of Color in the South for Artificial Intelligence and Open Data Research
Program Rationale:
The ever-accelerating volume and variety of data being generated is having a huge impact on a wide variety of research disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities. The rapid increase in the volume of data generated through electronic health records (EHR) and other biomedical research presents exciting opportunities for developing data science approaches (e.g., AI/ML methods) for biomedical research and improving healthcare.
Many challenges hinder the more widespread use of Open Data and AI/ML technologies, such as the cost, capability for widespread application, and access to appropriate infrastructure, resources, and training. Additionally, the lack of diversity of both data and researchers in the AI/ML field runs the risk of creating and perpetuating harmful biases in its practice, algorithms, and outcomes, thus fostering continued health disparities and inequities. Many underrepresented and underserved communities, which are often disproportionately affected by diseases and health conditions, have the potential to contribute expertise, data, diverse recruitment strategies, and cutting-edge science, and to inform the field on the most urgent research questions, but may lack financial, infrastructural, and data science training capacity to apply AI/ML approaches to research questions of interest to them. This program seeks to increase the artificial intelligence and open data readiness of health equity researchers of colour throughout the Southeast region.
Therefore, the South Big Data Hub will join CODATA-RDA, AIM-AHEAD Southeast Hub at Morehouse School of Medicine, and Microsoft to host a 10-week Researcher Data Science Training through a mix of virtual and in-person instruction. This would be the first CODATA-RDA School run in the United States and research teams from universities with the AIM-AHEAD Southeast Hub, the South Hub DataUp program and their expanded network would be invited to apply. The SMART-DART: Health Equity Cohort will focus on growing the competence of Health Equity researchers in accessing, analyzing, visualizing, and publishing data. It is open to participants from minority-serving institutions (MSIs), as described in the eligibility below. This activity will cover topics on principles and practice of Open Science, research data management and curation, use of a range of research compute infrastructures, large-scale analysis, statistics, visualization and modelling techniques, automation and scripting.
