Hawaii Open Stats is an effort to apply rigorous statistical analysis and thoughtful intepretation of data on some of Hawaii's most pressing issues - housing, migration, education, and more.

There is plenty of public data on these issues, but limited deep analysis, and that analysis is almost always squirreled away in buried pdf reports. As a result, our leaders often only see the statistics cherry-picked by lobbyists with agendas, and quote those statistics without full understanding of the broader context. The goal of Hawaii Open Stats to meaningfully add to this vital analysis, make that analysis easy to access, and be transparent about how these results were calculated and what they mean.

In the aftermath of the Maui wildfires of August, 2023, Matt built a website to help displaced families find housing. That led to analyzing public Airbnb, Craigslist, and Maui County Real Property Tax data to identify housing solutions that could scale to thousands of families. He quickly learned that almost nobody in the Federal, State, County, or non-profit world was seriously looking at data to tackle the urgent post-disaster housing problem. That epiphany was ultimately the catalyst for Hawaii Open Stats.

Raised on Maui, Matt is a proud graduate of Maui High School. He also has degrees in physics and computer science, with a concentration in artificial intelligence, from Stanford University. His professional experience includes being the technical lead of a leading algorithmic trading group, co-founding a cloud computing start-up, and writing machine learning software to analyze high energy particle physics data at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).