I’m really excited to officially announce the first annual pre-ASA datathon, taking place at Berkeley’s D-Lab on August 15-16, 2014.

The theme is “big cities, big data: big opportunity for computational social science,” the idea being looking at contemporary urban issues — especially housing challenges — using data gathered and made publicly available by cities including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, Somerville, Seattle, etc.

The hacking will start at noon on August 15 and go until the next day. Sleeping is optional. We’ll have a presentation and judging session in the evening of August 16 in San Francisco, exact location TBD.

We’re working with several academic and industry partners to bring together tools and datasets which social scientists can use at the event. So stay tuned as that develops.

You can apply here and see the full call [PDF].

ALSO — Check out the CITASA Symposium the morning of the 15th (citasasymposium.info) before joining us at noon for the Datathon! There’ll be a number of great talks which will complement the hacking over at the D-Lab.