CDS Undergraduate Speaker Vijay Fisch
Undergraduate Student Speaker Vijay Fisch Encourages Data Science for Future Good at 2026 CDS Convocation
After my sophomore year, I did a corporate internship on car insurance risk analysis. It was the right choice for my career, and I learned a lot. That same summer, the world witnessed the two hottest days in recorded history. I gathered no data on carbon sequestration to reduce global warming, but now the company knows that a Toyota with a backup camera and a Honda without one have the same fender bender frequency. That’s not to say that the car data was meaningless. The company needed it to price its insurance policies correctly. Even so, the glaciers kept melting.
It’s hard to comprehend how our inaction will be felt by the generations ahead of us. How Bostonians will feel in flooded Aprils and scorching Julys. How our children could never afford a home here. Which begs the question – what are we to do?
What we will do is stumble forward, like a horde of intoxicated freshmen running to catch the green line on a Friday night. Most of us, including me, will do what we are told to do.
What other kinds of work are we going to be doing? We’re going to be doing algorithmic pricing, charging different people different amounts for the same toothpaste because they come from different ZIP codes.
And I get it, in this economy, we have to take what we’re given. We might want to buy a home someday, maybe have kids to put through college, too; some of us might even retire.
There's nothing wrong with making a living. The question is whether making a living is the only thing we ever do with what we've learned over the past four years.
After BU, many of us will optimize, leverage synergies, drive efficiency, unlock value, increase click-through rates, monetize engagement, and so on, but every so often, think about Professor Barnes, whose research group at CDS focuses on responsibly harnessing AI to anticipate climate-induced changes to our planet.
Think about Professor Varia who helped develop a data aggregation algorithm that the City of Boston uses to reduce the gender wage gap.
Think about Professor McDonald, who works on preventing the nonconsensual use of nude images in machine learning training.
Think about Professor Cleary, who is using his $2.25M NIH grant to develop computational methods that can accelerate drug discovery research.
They’ve set a high bar. But what should we expect of ourselves? Rather than talking about the maximum we could accomplish, it might be more useful to think about the minimum. That is to say, the very minimum we owe our planet, our countries, our friends, our parents, and our children.
The minimum we owe our community is to stay away from jobs where we have to ask ourselves, “is what I’m being asked to do with this data comically evil?”
For example, I hope we avoid working on certain predatory marketing algorithms, like the one at Facebook that tracks a user's emotional state, and targets ads and pricing based on whether they are grieving or feeling useless. That doesn’t align with our values as ethical data scientists.
On the sliding scale of badness, I hope we agree that the algorithmic wage-bidding app for nurses is pretty bad. Nurses wake up at 5 a.m. to underbid each other for twelve-hour ICU shifts, and the nurse that accepts the lowest salary gets the job.
I hope we think carefully before working on products like Palantir's Maven–the AI-integrated targeting software that was part of the US military's decision-making pipeline during the airstrike on the Minab school in Iran, killing at least 120 elementary school students.
Even if we don’t work for companies like these, the reality is that most of us will still end up in jobs where community is not a top priority. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to make a difference. Here’s an idea: What if we just devote a little bit of time toward using the data skills we’ve learned for good.
This isn’t a novel idea. Lawyers at big law firms, for instance, have a pro bono requirement – the American Bar Association has an aspirational goal of 50 hours per year. Tech, finance, consumer product, private equity, social media, few of these sectors have that. But if lawyers can have pro bono hours, maybe the inaugural class of the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences can start a tradition too…“CDS Pro Bono.” Five years from now, I hope it’s normal for CDS alumni to provide free data services for social good.
50 hours per year is just an hour a week. That’s helping your local food bank optimize truck routes to reach more people in need; that’s helping a family-owned restaurant forecast inventory; that’s building a simple eviction dashboard for a housing non-profit.
We could even help improve the green line, and please, I beg, someone fix the green line.
I've been up here talking about what we owe our community, our planet, and the people who come after us. And we do owe them. But that's not the only reason I want us to make this commitment.
I want us to do it because someday we‘re going to be so deep in pricing optimization and click-through rates and quarterly earnings calls that we will forget how good it felt to do a SPARK! Practicum or a hackathon for social good. To work with fellow students who still believed we could make our communities better using data science. That feeling is going to fade. And when it does, the hour a week isn’t charity. It’s a tether back to the version of ourselves sitting in this room right now.
Congratulations, class of 2026!