DataRobot Unveils Beneficiaries of AI for Good: Powered by DataRobot Program

Participants from around the world will use DataRobot’s AI platform to advance world-changing causes

BOSTON, February 13, 2020 — DataRobot, the leader in enterprise AI, today announced its AI for Good: Powered by DataRobot inaugural class of organizations who will harness the power of AI for social good. The participants — Anacostia Riverkeeper, DonorsChoose, Kiva, University of California San Francisco, and Medical Faculty Mannheim – Heidelberg University — will all receive pro bono licenses to DataRobot’s enterprise AI platform as well as training and ongoing support from the company’s deep bench of data scientists and AI success managers.

DataRobot launched its AI for Good program in July following a successful partnership with the Global Water Challenge, which used AI to predict waterpoint breaks in African nations. On the heels of this deployment, the DataRobot team fielded applications from organizations spanning a dozen different countries focused on everything from environmental issues to child welfare. The proposals were evaluated on a myriad of factors, including use case applicability, data availability, and actionability of predictions.

“Nonprofits and social good organizations are doing tremendous work, and we know they can, and should, benefit from AI in the same way our commercial customers do,” said Chandler McCann, customer facing data scientist and head of AI for Good, DataRobot. “We were blown away by the quality and quantity of applications we received for this program and are thrilled to be putting DataRobot in the hands of organizations that are committed to improving numerous aspects of society. The combined power of their subject matter expertise and our AI solution will have a massive impact, and we’re only just getting started.”

The selected organizations have already started to work with DataRobot; details on the awardees and their use cases below:

• Anacostia Riverkeeper is a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Anacostia River and other waterways in the D.C. region that recently launched a water quality program for measuring E. coli samples at sites throughout the D.C. area. DataRobot and Anacostia Riverkeeper will build a forecast of E. coli levels for the Anacostia River to be able to predict the state of the river on a given day, and potentially extend the methodology to other Riverkeeper organizations and their waterways around the country and the world.
• DonorsChoose makes it easy for anyone to help a classroom in need, moving us closer to a nation where students in every community have the tools and experiences they need for a great education. They will use DataRobot to predict teacher and donor churn within the platform. Due to the scale of the platform, increasing donor and teacher retention by a few percentages could lead to hundreds of thousands in additional funding distributed to more schools and reaching tens of thousands of more students in a given year.
• Kiva is a tech nonprofit organization that has built a crowdfunding platform enabling lenders to provide microloans to about two million low-income entrepreneurs in about 80 countries; it will use DataRobot to predict and promote loans that have a high likelihood of not funding fully and therefore potentially expiring. Decreasing expiring or unfunded loans will lead to tens of thousands more loans being distributed to low-income entrepreneurs.
• Medical Faculty Mannheim – Heidelberg University is a university hospital that will use DataRobot to better understand the factors and predictors of the World Health Organization’s top causes of death using a large multi-year dataset covering tens of millions of hospital visits. Better predictions of mortality could inform doctors, hospitals, and even government agencies.
• University of California San Francisco (UCSF)’s Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC) is one of the leading research institutions on spinal cord injuries in the U.S.; care providers associated with the institution will use DataRobot to predict patient outcomes in critical situations, allowing for more precise decision-making, building on the hospital’s leadership in traumatic brain and spinal injuries. This project also has the potential to refine guidelines for treating traumatic spinal injuries, impacting thousands of patients across the U.S.

“Working with DataRobot is helping us to accelerate the discovery of effective spinal cord treatment options, which can be used to empower spinal cord injury care providers to make better decisions during critical situations, and inform treatment guidelines for hospitals all over the world,” said Adam Ferguson, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF.

DataRobot is accepting applications for its AI for Good program on a rolling basis. To learn more about or to apply for the program, visit datarobot.com/ai-for-good/.

About DataRobot

DataRobot is the leader in enterprise AI, delivering trusted AI technology and ROI enablement services to global enterprises competing in today’s Intelligence Revolution. DataRobot’s enterprise AI platform democratizes data science with end-to-end automation for building, deploying, and managing machine learning models. This platform maximizes business value by delivering AI at scale and continuously optimizing performance over time. The company’s proven combination of cutting-edge software and world-class AI implementation, training, and support services, empowers any organization – regardless of size, industry, or resources – to drive better business outcomes with AI.

With a singular focus on AI since its inception, DataRobot has a proven track record of delivering AI with ROI. DataRobot has offices across the globe and $431 million in funding from top-tier firms, including New Enterprise Associates, Sapphire Ventures, Meritech, and DFJ Growth. For more information, visit https://www.datarobot.com, and join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn.