This is the second edition of the workshop; the first was held jointly with ECML PKDD 2016. 

The possibilities of Data Science for contributing to social, common, or public good are often not sufficiently perceived by the public at large. Data science applications are already helping in 
serving people at the bottom of the economic pyramid, aiding people with special needs, helping international cooperation, or dealing with environmental problems, disasters, and climate change. In regular conferences and journals, papers on these topics are often scattered among sessions with names that hide their common nature (such as "Social networks", "Predictive models"" or even under the catch-all term "Applications"). 

Additionally, such forums tend to have a strong bias for papers that are novel in the strictly technical sense (new algorithms, new kinds of data analysis, new technologies) rather than novel in terms of social impact of the application.