Newswise — Despite persistent unemployment in the United States, millions of jobs are hard to fill due to a lack of qualified applicants. While community college and training organizations seek to equip people with the skills required for these openings, it’s a moving target as the American economy rapidly changes.

The newly launched National Center for Opportunity Engineering & Analysis (NCOEA) at the Computation Institute (CI) -- a joint initiative of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory – will use the latest computation and data science tools to help close the skills gap, reduce economic inequality, and provide new ways to search for training connected to employment and career opportunities.

"Societal challenges of this scale require us to combine data science with knowledge of how labor markets work. This is very much the kind of problem our Computational Social Science initiative is designed for.  We look forward to collaborating with the new center,” said David Nirenberg, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

NCOEA will begin its work to integrate disparate job experience, education and training and employment and labor data into new computational models in partnership with numerous organizations and other institutions to provide higher quality data outputs that can assist both existing programs as well as foster new forms of economic and social science research.

“We have applied advanced data science to large-scale and small-scale problems in groundbreaking work ranging from genomics to dark matter, and these same capacities are used daily for consumer sites and new apps,” said Michael Franklin, Liew Family Chair of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and Senior Advisor to the Provost for Computation and Data. “Yet, we have not applied this computational power to help people find education and training aligned with the quickly evolving job market or help them make career choices aligned with current trend data.”

NCOEA is a joint partnership with the National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET), a California non-profit that brings together academics, government agencies, corporations, community colleges, and workforce training organizations to more effectively solve pervasive problems for both practitioners and researchers. The new center will work with other units at the University of Chicago and organizations around the country, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego.

“This center capitalizes on cross-cutting science, expertise and computing to make a meaningful impact on job seekers and the economy,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne Associate Laboratory Director and CI Senior Fellow. “We welcome the opportunity to forward this new collaboration by providing scientific leadership and computing resources as part of the center’s future efforts.”

With this new capacity, economic and social science researchers can study finer-grained data about jobs, training offerings, and unemployment to guide policy and investments by local governments. Additionally, job search sites could create better “dating service”-like matching algorithms that pair up job seekers with available training aligned with open positions they may not otherwise discover.

"We look forward to helping to build NCOEA into a national resource to vastly improve the connections between education and training and the placement of individuals into current and evolving jobs and to advance careers,” said Ilkay Altintas, Chief Data Science Officer at SDSC. “The data problems are complex, but much can be done with big data and other methods to improve upon traditional practice.”

Some of this work is already in progress at UChicago and Argonne and will be unified under NCOEA. For example, the Workforce Data Initiative, a partnership between the CI’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy (DSaPP) and the U.S. Department of Labor and the National Economic Council, launched the Skills Cooperative Research Database in summer 2016. Likewise, NLET will place into the Center its ongoing work with community colleges and community college systems focused on designing new technologies to assist in regional three-way matches between jobseekers, training programs and employers with open jobs.

“I see this center becoming the premiere place for how we look at labor and education data, as well as a place for constructing opportunities to reduce economic inequality,” said Gordon Freeman, president of NLET. “The Center is a place where sophisticated computational modeling, focused on real problems in labor, education and job-seeking, can turn into scalable solutions capable of sustaining change. This need is especially acute regionally where specific adaptations are necessary due to local differences in demographics, education and employment composition.

NCOEA’s founding members also include James Evans, professor of sociology at UChicago and CI Senior Fellow; Ioana Marinescu, assistant professor of economics at UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy; and Matt Gee, senior research fellow at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy.

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About CIThe Computation Institute (CI), a joint initiative of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, is an intellectual nexus for scientists and scholars pursuing multi-disciplinary research and a resource center for developing and applying innovative computational approaches. Founded in 1999, it is home to over 100 faculty, fellows, and staff researching complex, system-level problems in such areas as biomedicine, energy and climate, astronomy and astrophysics, computational economics, social sciences and molecular engineering. CI is home to diverse projects including the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy, Knowledge Lab, The Urban Center for Computation and Data, the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, and Globus. ci.uchicago.edu

About NLETThe National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET) was formed to help create parity between the education and training sectors and other sectors of the economy and government, to bring learning, education-training and advanced technology into alignment so that human capital production in the U.S. can better match the human capital needs of the country. NLET is uniquely situated to carry out its mission because it has developed a comprehensive strategy focused on sector change that is informed by organizational transformations, information technology utilization, and cultural adaptations. NLET is the recipient and organizer of collaborative grants, contracts and sub-awards with NSF, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundations, and private funders. Founded in 2012 in Silicon Valley, NLET came into existence with university, corporate and research alliances. Founder Gordon Freedman is a leading expert on education and training technology and policy having worked in the private sector, for universities, government with other nonprofits. www.NLET.org

About SDSC As an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, SDSC is considered a leader in data-intensive computing and cyberinfrastructure, providing resources, services, and expertise to the national research community, including industry and academia. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible, integrated network of computer-based resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. SDSC’s Comet joins the Center’s data-intensive Gordon cluster, and are both part of the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program. www.sdsc.edu/