How one data-driven agency -- the Census Bureau -- found extra value in machine learning - FedScoop

Like many agencies, the Census Bureau looks for reductions in expenses and workloads when it makes decisions about machine learning. But the agency has discovered another advantage in the technology: It can find data that employees never knew they needed. More than 100 different surveys are handled by siloed programs within the Census Bureau, and the capture, instrumentation, processing and summation of the resulting data is "really hard to manage," said Zachary Whitman, chief data officer, at an AFCEA Bethesda event Wednesday, The bureau's dissemination branch exports data in a consolidated system where discovery and preparation is "difficult" for employees, Whitman said. So the agency is piloting ML that flags valuable information employees may not have even been searching for originally. "How do you get people to translate into information they might not know about but would be very valuable to them?" Whitman said.