Data for Hope™ 2018: Understanding Homelessness

In 2018, ATLytiCS partnered with Habitat for Humanity International for our first Data for Hope™ competition where participants were challenged to use publicly available data to help better understand homelessness.

The competition, sponsored by Alteryx and 3Sage Consulting, was held at the Southern Data Science Conference in April. Sixteen teams participated in the full day hackathon.

The overall community question was to identify and quantify the factors that drive shelter bed utilization rates at different locations across the US. The participants were tasked with defining shelter utilization rate, determining influencing factors, and making recommendations for improvement. These key insights were shared with Habitat for Humanity for action and further research.

Alteryx and 3Sage Consulting provided $5000 prize money to 1st Place winners (Xin Ma, Jia Liu, and Ying Shen) and 2nd Place winners (Binglun Hou, Siyan Guo, Swapnil Vijay) at an awards ceremony at the Southern Data Science Conference.