11 University Students Attempting to Change the World, One Saturday at a Time
Picture this: It’s a Saturday morning and instead of sleeping in until noon, 11 college students are cooped up in a tiny room, sleep deprived, buzzing on caffeine, and all talking about… world hunger? Yep, that was me and 10 other members of the COMPASS club at UC San Diego. We sat around a small table for 3 hours last Saturday morning trying to figure out how we could predict food insecurity in Bihar, India.
Here is the part of the article where you go, “why would anyone want to do that, much less 11 random college students?” Well, the global project of the COMPASS club at UCSD has been working on for about a year now to try and create a mathematical model that can predict rice and wheat insecurity, so that we can ultimately partner with a global organization to help prevent food insecurity.
For now, I’ll spare you all the gory details about the actual work we’re doing, and just focus on telling you why you should care about it. If you grew up in America, you were probably exposed to adults elusively talking about starving kids in Africa. You might have been shown pictures of emaciated children in different countries holding their hands out for food. Or maybe you were told statistics from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) about how 333 million people don’t know where their next meal will come from or that over 65% of the world’s hungriest people live in only 10 countries.
Then, you were probably told about the ways you could help: stop wasting food, donate to organizations like Food For Thought or No Kid Hungry, or to develop a newfound sense of appreciation for what you have. Those ideas are all great, but after hearing their options, most kids either went on with their lives and forgot about the issue, or never felt like they could make a meaningful difference.
So, that’s how a group of 11 UCSD strangers ended up together on a Saturday morning: the desire to overcome the feeling of helplessness. We’re all studying some branch of Data Science, Mathematics, or Computer Science, so, when the club’s global project leader, Alejandro Soumah, decided to expand his team, we all applied. He handpicked the students who demonstrated the most passion about the idea and we immediately got started.
As someone who has heard about world hunger since I was a child, I had assumed that since there were so many people around the world working to solve it, there couldn’t be any new ideas about it, at least not from college students. I hadn’t realized when I initially started working in COMPASS, that we are trying to create something from the ground up, something that does not exist yet. There are current real-time data graphs about food insecurity around the world, but no one has figured out how to make long-term predictions. It’s a very challenging task, and large organizations can’t put their limited resources into such a daunting idea that won’t be able to predict with 100% certainty.
So that left me with the biggest question of all, if we won’t be able to predict with guaranteed accuracy, then why are we putting so much energy into this? Alejandro, who was one of the original creators of this idea, put the question into perspective for me, “We are just trying to make an accurate prediction, but at the end of the day, it’s just a prediction. Just like the weather, it can be wrong, but we still look at the weather predictions every morning.”
So there was my answer, even though the weather forecast can be wrong, most people still look at it before getting dressed in the morning. This is what COMPASS is aspiring to do. We aren’t trying to predict with 100% accuracy, we just want to create a model that is accurate enough so organizations like the WFP can use it to prepare for famine, food price spikes, or environmental factors. If we can make it accurate enough that organizations will look at it every morning, then we will have succeeded.
Let’s finish up by talking about final goals for the club and why you may want to continue paying attention. Our next step in the project is making prediction models for rice prices in different states of India using the foreign commodity markets, like the Zhengzhou commodity exchange and ensuring it is connected to our version of the dynamic heatmap website. We have been able to identify relevant seasonal and linear trends and we’ve built a 3-part model to predict the price of rice. Currently, we’re looking for more components and data to add to our model, focusing our efforts on regional unemployment and GDP data. Our end goal is to be able to take the World Food Programme’s Hunger Map and create our own map for predicting food insecurity using financial, economic, and logistical data.
If we can do that, we may create a piece of technology that could change the way global food organizations prepare for famine. It could open a door for prediction based modeling that could be applied to other areas of the world like the economy, natural disasters, and global pandemics. Even though we are just a small group of students working together, if we continue rolling out of bed every Saturday morning, we could change the world. Wouldn’t it be fun to follow along as we do it?
If you’re a student at UCSD, a student at a different university, or generally interested in getting involved with COMPASS, we would love to hear from you! Please email alejandrosoumah@compassinstitution.com or check our the club’s website https://compassinstitution.com/ with any questions, concerns, ideas, or ways to get involved!
Written by: Celeste Walstrom-Vangor
