USING GENERATIVE AI & MACHINE LEARNING IN THE ENTERPRISE + STARTUP SHOWCASE
AUSTIN + ON-DEMAND | February 19-20, 2025
Amanda Ford
Data Program Manager, Mayor’s Office of Innovation at City and County of San Francisco
Amanda Ford leads data programs at the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Innovation. She uses data science to create useful data products that improve people’s lives. Over the last two years, Dr. Ford has led an effort to improve street outreach for unhoused individuals by creating an improved data-backed system that enables better care. She also teaches Machine Learning Systems Engineering to grad students at UC Berkeley. Previously, Dr. Ford was a tech lead at Google, working on metrics for Google shopping and Google Maps. Prior to that, she was Head of Clinical Data Science at Livongo Health (now Teledoc Health). Trained as an astrophysicist, her work on galaxy formation and evolution has appeared in Science, The Astrophysical Journal, and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Her creative writing on living with a disability has been published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Crossroads.
Watch in-person: February 19
How Hard is it to Use Data to Tackle Street Homelessness?
To improve street conditions and address the homelessness crisis, the City of San Francisco employs over a dozen specialized street outreach teams. These teams reverse overdoses; provide mental, physical, and behavioral medical care; make housing referrals; and, more broadly, improve the street conditions and public safety of the city. These efforts are often heroic, yet there are still people on the street in crisis.
The promise of data science is that we have tools to use data to improve these and other civic challenges: we have algorithms to fuzzy match across different departments’ databases; we have models to predict outcomes and intervene with high-risk individuals; we have analyses and trials to learn what methods work best.
How does this work in practice, though? What are the legal, organizational, procedural, and technical challenges in actually levering this data? In this talk, Dr. Amanda Ford explains how her team tackled these and other issues, and improved homeless outreach in San Francisco.