2022 DSPG Final Student Presentations
The final presentations for the 2022 Data Science for the Public Good Program were held on Thursday August 4th, 2022 via Zoom. Recordings of the presentations are provided below. Questions regarding DSPG can be sent to dspg@iastate.edu. Links to the project presentations and files will be provided in GitHub and added to the list below around mid-August.
DSPG Disclaimer: Please note that the data and results presented are student work. While the students strive to be as complete and accurate as they can, this is also a learning internship and therefore errors may exist. Following these student presentations, faculty and staff review the data, scripts and results before use in final publications.
 |
Wholesale Local Food Benchmarking Iowa is currently in need of a data process/platform that will provide more localized and up to date information on regional food systems, specifically information around price points for local products. The Iowa State Farm Food and Enterprise Development (FEED) is frequently asked for benchmarks on pricing of products both in retail and wholesale spaces. There is a need for additional data and research on the potential sales point for these wholesale products when many of our specialty crop producers across the state are operating in direct-to-consumer retail spaces. While data is available from the AMS and USDA (including the Agricultural Census), there is limited aggregation of sales for these products at the local level. |
 |
Successful Employment for Persons with Disabilities in Iowa Data on disabilities for practical use by Iowa’s policy makers, advocates, and grant seekers are often difficult to access or displayed independently to one another. This presents a difficulty in fully understanding the complexities surrounding persons with disabilities and their success at employment in Iowa’s workforce. To tackle the accessibility of this data, this project aims to discover, profile, and present data pertaining to successful employment for Iowans with disabilities and to serve as a foundation for connecting various data sources on employment through the assessment of public services available to Iowans with disabilities. |
 |
Exploratory Measures for Analysis of Local Housing Needs Local housing policy seeks to balance private sector realities with public sector goals. Key concerns of local decision-makers include availability, affordability, and accessibility of housing stock for diverse demographic groups of the society. Effective housing policy development requires awareness of the types and extent of local housing need as well as the barriers to private sector investment. Accordingly, local decision-makers seek reliable and current sources of data to help set their housing policy priorities. This process might face hardships due to time and budget limits, inflexible tabulation formats, lack of detail and time sensitivity in data sources. In this project, we explored how much and what types of data are available to describe local housing markets. We obtained, reorganized, categorized, and analyzed data sets from a wide variety of housing-related sources. Finally, we provided a set of housing-related indicators summarized and visualized in a unified format to provide decision-makers with the opportunity of housing status evaluation and comparison among different geographical levels of communities. |
 |
Beginning Farmer Asset Mapping This project formed as a need to aid beginner farmers in making the right choices for their farming practices through an interactive application. Through research on specialty crops, soil information and climate data, the project aims to display pertinent farming factors in relation to one another to provide feasible options for beginning farmers. Using leaflet and Tableau, created a dashboard that would dynamically update information to match location and specialty crop information. We hope that this project serves as the foundation for getting farmers setup on their next farming journey. |
 |
Interactive Commodity Reports for Agricultural Marketing (AgMRC) AgMRC commodity reports can be used as preliminary research in order to determine current production, market analysis, demographic data, and price points. It can be useful when applying for grants, financial institution loans, and other types of funding. The customizable marketing studies provide market intelligence to Value Added Producer Grant (VAPG) applicants that can be easily incorporated into feasibility studies and business plans that support the application process. Reports will have demographic data (population, race, ethnicity, family structure, income), food data (food deserts, food security, market kinds - schools, restaurants), interactive visualization, and improved geographic filters to offer national and state-level data that can be downloaded as pdf. |