Fostering Data Driven Culture in the City of Rochester

Henry Fitts

An overview of the work of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation driving data driven change both within city hall and in the Rochester community. Henry will also discuss the value of partnerships, major barriers to success, and opportunities for the future.

Democratizing Data: Citizen-Driven Data

Ann Howard

This session will address the role citizens can play in collecting and analyzing data that is meaningful to their everyday lives. Questions to be addressed: How can citizen-generated data be used to facilitate the discovery of new knowledge and understanding and the application of existing knowledge through community-based participatory action research? How can citizen-generated data focus the discovery process on the study of everyday life in urban neighborhoods, determine what residents want to change, and use this data to collaboratively develop and implement a plan to accomplish change?

Smart City Services: Technology Gaps for Mission Critical Services

Ali Raza

Similar to the human anatomy, the heartbeat of our city depends on a number of vital functions being able to operate and survive peak loads that can stress the systems. These functions are mission critical and require infrastructure from masonry to cyber-physical systems as support. Without such support being an integral part of the smart city planning and evolution, stress points can lead to irreversible failure or a cardiac arrest. As cities become smarter and attract larger populations, the use of technology to manage the stress and ensure survival of mission critical services is presented through a number of use cases. The use cases presented are derived from some of the challenges faced in the Middle East region where cities do not only cope with large populations but with an imbalanced mix of cultures. The technology and infrastructure gaps are identified and discussed. Areas of research are proposed, which can drive the development of the right infrastructure strategy in a scalable and sustainable way

Research Issues in Connecting Devices to Cloud : Case Studies in Smart Urban Environments

Janakiram D.

A number of initiatives are being undertaken both in India and US to create smart urban environments. At the core of creating such smart urban environment is connecting a variety of sensor devices to cloud, doing analytics on the streams of data received and smart control of these sensor devices. We categorize the research challenges into two categories, one category relating to the middleware infrastructure and the second relating to data analytics. We study these challenges for a number of smart city applications in India and present case studies of a start-up company in developing these applications. We also outline some of the future research directions and challenges relating to smart city applications.

Computing in the Continuum: Harnessing a Pervasive Data Ecosystem

Manish Parashar

The exponential growth of digital data sources enabled by the IoT coupled with the ubiquity of non-trivial computational power, at the edges, in the core and in-between, for processing this data have the potential for fundamentally transforming our ability to understand and manage our lives and our environment. One can envision data-driven and information-rich pervasive ecosystems that seamlessly and opportunistically combine data and computing power to model, manage, control, adapt and optimize virtually any realizable sub-system of interest -- examples exist in diverse application areas from disaster management and recovery to optimizing everyday processes and improving quality of life. In this talk I will explore computing in the continuum – a computing paradigm that can opportunistically leverage heterogeneous, complex and loosely connected data and computing resources at the edges to process data in-situ and in-transit, transforming it into knowledge and insights that are actionable. Using examples from our work in the CometCloud project, I will present research challenges as well as some initial solutions towards realizing this paradigm.

Crowdsourcing and Crowdsensing Requirements for Urban Applications

Pradeep Murukannaiah

Requirements engineering (RE) involves eliciting, representing, and reasoning about the needs of an application's stakeholders. Traditional RE techniques do not scale for urban applications with a large variety of stakeholders. We introduce Crowd RE, a novel avenue that seeks to scale RE to the masses. First, we describe a methodology for soliciting creative requirements from the general public or the so-called crowd. Second, I describe how RE, traditionally a design-time activity, can capture stakeholders' evolving requirements at run time. Both these directions in Crowd RE are data-driven. Specifically, we employ (1) novelty detection to identify novel and useful requirements from the large set of crowd-acquired requirements, and (2) active learning to reduce the burden on stakeholders during RE at runtime.

From Census to Sensors: Urban Data for Science and Solutions

Gregory Dobler

With millions of interacting people and hundreds of governing agencies, urban environments are the largest, most dynamic, and most complex macroscopic systems on Earth. Recent advances in the collection and digitization of urban data combined with anunprecedented increase in the quantification of cities via sensors promises to yield unique insights into how cities function. But can the fusion of that data, with its enormous complexity, serve as a vehicle towards solving city problems and impacting city operations? I will describe ways that we at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) are tackling this problem using several examples including the monitoring of pollutant emission via the newly created CUSP "Urban Observatory", traffic safety metrics assessed through computer vision, leveraging public park data into opportunities for improving quality of greenspaces, and spatio-temporal prediction of waste generation in the city of New York.

Urban morphology and structural invariants in street networks

Goourab Ghoshal

Streets networks are the primary facilitators of movement in urban systems, allowing residents to navigate the different functional components of a city. Since navigability is a key ingredient of socioeconomic activity, roads represent one of its most important infrastructural components and a large body of work has elucidated its structural properties. Yet more than the physical layout, it is the sampling of street networks that serves as a true fingerprint of the complex interactions between people, and the flow of goods and services in urban systems, a feature of which there is limited understanding. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic mesoscale study of street morphology (shape of sampled routes) through the introduction of a novel metric that we term inness. The inness encapsulates the direction, orientation and length of routes, thus revealing the morphology of connectivity in street networks, including the distribution of implicit socioeconomic forces that may inform routing choices. In particular, this metric enables us to put functions of individual streets in the context of the dynamics of the whole city (Broadway or Fifth avenue in NYC, for instance), linking local structures to large-scale urban organization.  The dynamics of a city of course is intricately related to the flow of people and goods and services, a structural measure of which is the betweenness centrality. We show that the global distribution of betweenness is an invariant quantity once one accounts for the proper scale and provide a qualitative analytical description, based on Minimal Spanning Trees embedded in 2D space, to explain this remarkable invariance. 

Smarter Cities for Smarter Growth - How cities can optimize their systems for the talent-based economy

John Hoh

In the aftermath of the recent global economic crisis, cities around the world face serious economic challenges. However, sustainable economic vitality and effective methods to address near-term cost issues require cities to develop a more strategic response to job creation. Cities must focus more on the quality of jobs created – and the people who choose the city to create and fill those jobs – rather than just on the quantity of new jobs. The evidence strongly suggests the capacity of a city to create and absorb talent and innovation into its economy will crucially depend on the delivery of core city services in a citizen-centric manner.

A Machine Learning Approach on Providing Recommendations for the Vacant Lot Problem

Naveen Sharma

Vacant lots are neglected properties in a city that lead to environ- mental hazards and poor standard of living for the community. us, reclaiming vacant lots and pu ing them to productive use is an important consideration for many cities. Given a large num- ber of vacant lots and resource constraints for conversion, two key questions for a city are (1) whether to convert a vacant lot or not; and (2) what to convert a vacant lot as. We seek to provide computational support to answer these questions. To this end, we identify the determinants of a vacant lot conversion and build a rec- ommender based on those determinants. We evaluate our models on real-world vacant lot datasets from the US cities of Philadelphia, PA and Baltimore, MD. Our results indicate that our recommender yields mean F-measures of (1) 90% in predicting whether a vacant lot should be converted or not within a single city, (2) 91% in pre- dicting what a vacant lot should be converted to, within a single city and, (3) 85% in predicting whether a vacant lot should be converted or not across two cities.

icitizen.com - One click and your voice is heard

Tony Harkin

Want to send your feedback to your representative, but don't want to scream into the void? Do you want to gauge real-time feedback from your constituents or members to drive policy decisions or strengthen your campaign? icitizen.com is an award-winning polling platform that connects people and decision-makers to do just that – make their community a better place. icitizen is an online polling tool that helps citizens and decision-makers influence and drive informed decisions. icitizen removes the headache of engaging in the political process, regardless of whether you’re a citizen, organization, elected official or school.