CareerVillage is a tech nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA that crowdsources career advice for youth at massive scale. The problem we solve is that low-income and underrepresented youth lack the networks they need to access basic career advice. This contributes to the career readiness crisis faced by youth in countries around the world. Our solution is crowdsourced Q&A platform just like StackOverflow or Quora, but tailored to the needs of our 3M+ online learners and our 20,000+ registered volunteers. Despite launching just a few years ago, CareerVillage.org has already been recognized with financial support from AT&T, FFWD.org, Google.org, Lumina Foundation, PwC, Verizon and others.
Core Challenge
Even if a small tech nonprofit can put together a high-performing machine learning model, supporting that model in production over months and years requires knowledge, experience, and hard work. How can we help the tech nonprofit CareerVillage.org build the infrastructure, systems, and processes they need to support a mission-critical Machine Learning application for the long run?
Projects
ML Engineering: Design and build an infrastructure, system, and processes for deploying, monitoring, managing, maintaining, and continuously improving a mission-critical content recommendation machine learning system in production.
Integration: Integrate the work of a couple of other teams working on smaller pieces of the puzzle such as building the actual recommendation model itself (including a Delta Analytics ML team and a not-yet-confirmed Jan/Feb 2019 Kaggle competition dedicated to CareerVillage.org)
Thought leadership: Publish publicly any guidelines, blog posts, or appropriate code that other tech nonprofits or startups can use to implement similar systems.
Impact
If successful, this project will enable CareerVillage.org to improve the most important feature of its platform: the ability to effectively match student requests for career advice to the 20,000+ registered volunteers at CareerVillage.org. Even a 1% increase in the accuracy of matches would lead to tens of thousands more students getting personalized career advice over the following 12 months.
Core Skills Needed
Machine Learning Engineering, Project Management, experience working with ML systems in real-world production environments, Python.
Current Tech Stack
React front end, Python/Django backend, Redis + Postgres db, on AWS EC2+RDS, etc.
CNN model for topic prediction (using fastText library) on AWS Lambda (managed with Serverless Framework)
Admin reporting tools: some in Django app, some sent to Google Sheets via Google Docs API.
Project contact Jared Chung, CareerVillage.org Founder (and Python dev!)
CareerVillage is a tech nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA that crowdsources career advice for youth at massive scale. The problem we solve is that low-income and underrepresented youth lack the networks they need to access basic career advice. This contributes to the career readiness crisis faced by youth in countries around the world. Our solution is crowdsourced Q&A platform just like StackOverflow or Quora, but tailored to the needs of our 3M+ online learners and our 20,000+ registered volunteers. Despite launching just a few years ago, CareerVillage.org has already been recognized with financial support from AT&T, FFWD.org, Google.org, Lumina Foundation, PwC, Verizon and others.
Core Challenge
Even if a small tech nonprofit can put together a high-performing machine learning model, supporting that model in production over months and years requires knowledge, experience, and hard work. How can we help the tech nonprofit CareerVillage.org build the infrastructure, systems, and processes they need to support a mission-critical Machine Learning application for the long run?
Projects
Impact
If successful, this project will enable CareerVillage.org to improve the most important feature of its platform: the ability to effectively match student requests for career advice to the 20,000+ registered volunteers at CareerVillage.org. Even a 1% increase in the accuracy of matches would lead to tens of thousands more students getting personalized career advice over the following 12 months.
Core Skills Needed
Machine Learning Engineering, Project Management, experience working with ML systems in real-world production environments, Python.
Current Tech Stack
Project contact Jared Chung, CareerVillage.org Founder (and Python dev!)