Data Tech 2026

Local government data is a machine learning goldmine – and a minefield. A false positive isn’t a bad recommendation or misplaced ad: it’s someone’s food assistance, healthcare, or housing stability on the line. Our team in Hennepin County has spent over seven years piloting classification models for these kind of high-stakes risks. We’ll cover the technical stuff – model design, evaluation, data quality under equity constraints – and the harder stuff: building trust with leadership and communities at the receiving end. Familiarity with supervised learning helps. A tolerance for ambiguity helps more.