The Marron Institute's Civic Analytics team is one of 20 grantees of Google's AI Impact Challenge. The Impact Challenge was an open call to nonprofits, social enterprises, and research institutions from around the world to submit their ideas to use Artificial Intelligence to help address societal challenges. Over 2600 organizations applied. The grantees were announced by Google today. The Civic Analytics team will receive a grant to partner with the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning models to understand and improve emergency response times. Read the press release here.

The purpose of this workshop is to identify the data, models, and tools needed to understand the “city pulse” and to explore possible applications in both “data-rich” and “data-poor” environments. This includes a review of various sensor modalities (remote, in-situ, mobile), administrative data, social media and citizen-generated data,and transactional data, together with issues of data acquisition, management and sharing, and privacy, bias, and security. The workshop was organized by DARPA's Microsystems Exploratory Council.

This workshop focused on defining the needs within underserved communities and community service providers for increased awareness of the importance of data literacy and how data science might be applied to address intractable problems within these communities. The workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation and organized by the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.

Sang in the Mendelssohn Glee Club's winter concert at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue

Presented "Open Trash Lab: Improving Waste Management Through Data Analytics and Public Participation"

Our work A Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Model of Urban Carbon Emissions for Data-Driven Climate Action by Cities was presented by Dr. Constantine Kontokosta at the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange conference.

Our team won the "Data Visualization Award" from the UN Global Pulse Data for Climate Action Challenge for our project "A Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Model of Urban Carbon Emissions to Drive Climate Action by Cities".

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency presents this webinar on data use in community air quality projects as part of the Smart City Air Challenge webinar series. We will hear three prsentations on how communities are collecting and using data from air quality sensors to understand local environmental conditions.

The paper "Digital Traces: Modeling Urban Mobility using Wi-Fi Probe Data" was presented during the 6th International Workshop on Urban Computing. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 23rd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Read the paper here.

The SDG SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 was held to conceive ways to use Open Data, crowdsourcing technoogies, and low-cost open source solution to tackle sustainable development in ways that even schoolchildren can participate in, and develop prototypes suitable for deployment. In NYC, the school was in close collaboration with UNICEF and focused on urban waste!

We presented our current work - Understanding Neighborhood Dynamics Through Low-cost In-situ Sensing of the Urban Troposhpere - during the 13th Symposium on the Urban Environment.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Research Conference is a multi-disciplinary annual research conference focused on a wide variety of important current and emerging policy and management issues. Our work "Urban Phenology: Using Wifi Data for Localized, Real-Time Population Estimates" was accepted to the conference and presented by Dr. Constantine E. Kontokosta during the "Linking Multiple Data Sources for Policy Research: Methods and Applications" session.

The Data for Good Exchange is a conference focused on using data science and human capital to solve problems at the core of society. We presented our recent work about deploying low-cost sensors in Red Hook.

This event was hosted by GovLab and aimed to bring together government officials and topic experts to tackle the root causes of Zika. This conference was focused on finding solutions to standing water - prime location for mosquito larve - caused by waste. Read more here

The Red Hook Initiative Digital Stewards is a group of motivated young adults exploring technology applications within their community. This event focused on learning about low-cost sensing techniques and the possibility to develop and deploy the sensors locally to further understand neighborhood activity.

Girl Scout Troop 5399 from Staten Island is going on a journey to learn about air. All aspects of air. To aid them in their quest, we teamed up to build a few dust particles sensors and surveyed downtown Brooklyn to see how clean the air actually is. Check out the documentation at PublicLab.org

This event brought together scientists, designers and artists to develop crowdfunded campaigns for science. This first-of-a-kind event was a great opportunity to explore science and re-think how science projects can be funded. Read more here

This workshop was organized by the Information Communications 4 Development group and focused on the complete life cycle of electronics - from mining minerals to disposal. Intense discussions were ensued over the "problem" of e-waste and role of western intervention in a place like Agbogbloshie. Check out the videos online here

Organized by the UN University and STeP, this conference brought together researchers studying electronic waste it's various impacts. This week long experience featured attendee presentations, expert lectures and a tour of China's electronic recycling industry.

Every year Mozfest is mixing things up with an unconference bringing together 1500 people dedicated to hacking and reinventing the web. This year, I helped facilitate a session dedicated to citizen science on the web: Up-science!

New York is filled with active and passionate people as seen during the People's Climate March 2014. The march was made up of a constellation of different people all aligned with the same interest. View Images

Working with Public Lab to demo their latest spectrometry kit and chat with people interested in DIY science!

Throughout the development of Open Trash Lab, researchers from IBM have been very supportive and share an interest in exploring waste analytics. As such, a small group presented out waste research at the IBM Watson research laboratory.Read More

Balloon photography at Freshkills Park has been an ongoing project over the past year. Recently, data being collected from these outings is being used to identify an invasive plant species called phragmites. Using this low cost arial mapping kit, we hope to help the Parks Department mitigate phragmites' impact. Read More

EcoHack was a weekend dedicated to exploring nature through the use of technology. Strangers team up to build the tools to help explore the natural world around them. For Ecohack, a group of people formed around exploring landfills and visualizing landfill data. The results can be found here at the team website.

Towers of Power is a course I co-taught with Benedetta Simeonidias at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. The course explored GSM cellular networks and the various open source platforms to deploy your own cellular network. Students learned the foundational components of cellular networks, cell phones and the protocols to send and receive information via the network. Students developed projects ranging from illegal logging alert systems, clothing that automatically updates your Facebook status, non-traditional cellphone and much more. Visit the class website

The 3rd Annual Citizen Cyberscience Summit at the University College in London, brought together researchers, developers and citizens to explore and discuss topics related to citizen science. The three day conference featured discussions ranging from the DIY maker movement to the relationship between academics and citizen researchers. The conference also held a hackday in which participants had an opportunity to build, design and develop further future projects. I also had the opportunity to present my work related to the Life of Trash project to the enthusiastic and curious audience.

In June 2013, President Obama, together with European Commission President Barroso and European Council President Van Rompuy, announced that the United States and the European Union (EU) will launch negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement. In response, the Transatlantic Science Forum (TSF) is hosting a series of meetings to focus attention potential impact of proposed free trade measures on science collaboration and economic growth. CUSP is hosting a Transatlantic Science Forum meeting to highlight the importance of access and use of Big Data for promoting innovation and the role of subnational initiatives, such as New York City’s Applied Sciences NYC, in fostering international research collaborations.

As a second part of the online course Public Mapping Mission, we gathered a team of brave souls to venture out onto Newtown Creek, one of the most polluted waterways in the country, to attempted to take aerial images. The day was extremely cold and windy which made it nearly impossible to gather any quality data. Nevertheless, we ventured onto the water. Special thanks to the North Brooklyn Boat Club, World Science Festival and the Public Lab!

In collaboration with Public Lab, the GovLab Academy, the Center for Urban Science and Progress and P2P University, we are organizing an online course titled Public Mapping Mission which is dedicated towards a better understanding of open science and its role in influencing public policy. The course will be offered in two parts, first an online panel discussion with a follow-up course about balloon mapping. To sign up for the course visit The GovLab Academy.

Bringing people together from around the globe, Public Lab's Barnraising event is an opportunity for people to share ideas, solve problems and come together to do things in the style of a community coming together to build a barn! Though our initial location was quickly changed due to a hurricane, we spent the week end in Louisiana learning and sharing.

Back to Freshkills Park for more balloon photography! This time joined by thousands of attendees curious about the park. In partnership with the Center for Urban Science and Progress, the Public Laboratory, Open Trash Lab and Freshkills Park, I led two balloon mapping workshops throughout the course of the day. View photos on Flickr.