Democratizing Urban Data Exploration with Juliana Freire (NYU)
Event Recap
Democratizing Urban Data Exploration
The ability to collect data from urban environments through a variety of sensors, coupled with a push towards openness and transparency by governments, has resulted in the availability of a plethora of spatio-temporal datasets. By analyzing these data, we can better understand how different urban components behave and interact over space and time, and obtain insights to make city operations more efficient, inform policies and planning, and improve the quality of life for residents. While there have been successful efforts in this direction, they are few and far between. Analyzing urban data often requires a staggering amount of work, from identifying and wrangling relevant data, to carrying out exploratory analyses and creating predictive models — tasks that are often out of reach for domain experts that lack training in computing and data science. In this talk, I will discuss research we have done that aims to democratize data exploration. I will present methods and systems which combine data management, analytics, and visualization to increase the level of interactivity, scalability, and usability for spatio-temporal data analyses.