DAC Student Spotlight: Subhodip Biswas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The omnipresent activity of school redistricting is driving Ph.D, student Subhodip Biswas’s research at the Discovery Analytics Center.

“Through blogs and news articles, I became aware that school redistricting happens in some US public school systems almost every year,” said Biswas, who earned a bachelor ‘s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Jadavpur University in India in 2014. “It was fascinating to learn how numerous considerations go into designing new school zones.”

“I took a deep dive into this area, learning more and more about the process,” he said. “My interest cemented even further when I attended the Loudoun County Public School’s rezoning meetings last fall.”

Biswas, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, uses data-driven methodologies to better understand the process and thinks about helping citizens come up with alternative redistricting plans that meet their needs.

For Loudoun County, Biswas designed a crowdsourcing platform for parents whose children would be affected by the redistrict. Using this website, parents could visualize school zone maps and proposed changes; understand how the changes would affect people in each neighborhood; see the most popular plans; share their own opinions; learn what others think; and even submit their own plans.

DAC and Biswas are exploring opportunities to use a similar crowdsourcing platform with other area school systems who are undergoing redistricting.

“Through my research I aim to bring computational support and transparency to the process of school rezoning by showing parents the considerations that go into making these plans,” said Biswas, who is projected to receive his Ph.D. in computer science in 2019.

Biswas said that at DAC he has been able to assimilate knowledge from various areas like political science, geographical information systems, spatial data mining, education, and crowdsourcing.

“Using this unique set of knowledge, I want to go into academia and make a difference,” Biswas said.  “I feel that data science has a lot of areas yet to be explored and I would like to devote my professional career to doing that.”