EDSI — Center for Educational Data Science & Innovation

Advancing Education Equity & Effectiveness with Data & AI

About EDSI

The Center for Educational Data Science and Innovation (EDSI) at the University of Maryland is a research center committed to improving educational outcomes through rigorous, data-driven methods. Situated within UMD’s College of Education, EDSI’s work spans data science, artificial intelligence, educational research, and policy innovation.

We strive to:

• Advance equity in education by ensuring data and AI tools benefit all students, especially those from underserved communities
• Boost educational effectiveness and efficiency through evidence-based interventions, real-time analytics, and intelligent systems
• Foster collaboration across domains — educators, researchers, policymakers, and industry partners — to responsibly implement data and AI in education

EDSI leads and supports numerous initiatives, including multimodal classroom data collection (e.g., audio, video, transcripts, annotations), development of AI tools for teaching and learning, and open research infrastructure.

What You’ll Find Here

This organization serves as a hub for our open software, tools, and data-driven research. Repositories fall into several categories:

• Core Projects — foundational systems, APIs, and software maintained by EDSI
• Research Prototypes & Experiments — proof-of-concept models, analyses, and exploratory code
• Datasets & Annotations — anonymized datasets (where allowed), annotation tools, and utilities
• Documentation & Guides — user manuals, API docs, methodological notes
• Community Contributions — extensions, plug-ins, and collaborators’ projects

Every repository is intended to be accessible, transparent, and open to community engagement.

Contributing

We welcome participation from developers, researchers, and educators. To make it easy and fair:

1. Read the Code of Conduct — all behavior should be respectful and inclusive (see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)
2. Check contribution guidelines in each repo — many provide templates for issues, pull requests, and changelogs
3. Write clear commit messages & tests when appropriate
4. Respect licensing — most projects adopt permissive open licenses (e.g. MIT, Apache)
5. Engage via Issues / Discussions — use the appropriate channels to propose ideas, report bugs, or ask clarifying questions

For first-time contributors, we encourage looking at documentation repositories or helping with small issues.

Support & Contact

If you'd like to collaborate, ask questions, or learn more:

• Open an Issue or Discussion in a repository
• Send email: edsi@umd.edu
• Visit our website: edsi.umd.edu
• Follow us on social media:
  • X / Twitter: @EDSI_UMD
  • LinkedIn, YouTube, Bluesky — see links in the repository header

Staying Updated

Stay in the loop with:

• Project and release announcements
• Upcoming workshops, events, or webinars
• Calls for collaboration or dataset access
• Research publications and reports

We regularly post updates via GitHub, our website, and social media channels.

Thank you for visiting EDSI’s GitHub organization. We hope you’ll explore, experiment, and contribute. Together, let’s build technologies and insights that make education more equitable, effective, and empowered by data.

— The EDSI Team