Congratulations to Abdulaziz Al-Homaid, our Data Science student at the College of Science and Engineering, for being among the top four out of more than 700 applicants for the fellowship program that Education Above All Foundation (EAA) ran in partnership with The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and The Centre for Humanitarian Data in The Hague in June and July 2018. This program brought together a group of Fellows to design and deliver projects targeted at education data challenges including Data Science, Data Storytelling, Predictive Analytics, and User Experience Research.

Al-Homaid’s journey to the fellowship began through him exploring information on a blog posted on The Centre for Humanitarian Data website. Titled An Overview of Education Data on HDX, the blog informed readers of the education data that is available and that which is not. “The analysis highlighted a major problem: the data that is critical for understanding education in emergencies is either missing or unidentified,” Al-Homaid states in his blog post.

“The main objective of my fellowship was to discover and improve access to education data across organizations and crises, and reshape it into a structured format. My idea was to develop a ‘meta-dataset’ on education in emergencies that could be used to analyze completeness for specific indicators and locations,” he states in his post.

The opportunity Al-Homaid received was the outcome of EAA’s commitment to provide leadership in the area of education related data. The EAA Foundation through its Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict programme aims to promote and protect safe access to quality education in challenging environments. 

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