Internet Innovation
Educational and economic opportunity, as well as health outcomes, depend on the availability of affordable, high-speed Internet access. The COVID-19 pandemic—and in particular society’s increasing reliance on reliable high-speed broadband Internet access during the crisis—has accelerated and magnified these existing disparities. As the essential tasks of living, such as learning, job seeking, and accessing health care move online, Internet access is increasingly an issue of educational equality and economic opportunity, one that disproportionately hurts low-income families and minorities.
The lack of precise broadband deployment data complicates this issue: Historically, FCC broadband maps have often relied on census block data, which overestimates households with Internet access and lacks fine-grained detail. With a grant from data.org, our team innovated new, powerful data science approaches to gather and aggregate multiple data sources and enable the production of accurate broadband maps. We also created an Internet measurement and performance toolkit to allow policymakers, administrators, and the public to locate and understand the gaps in Internet coverage and target critical resource investments among communities most in need.
The Internet Innovation Initiative brought together interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Chicago, including the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and the Office of Civic Engagement, to work with Chicago Public Schools and local partners such as civic non-profit organization Kids First and urban solutions accelerator City Tech Collaborative to develop technical tools and data that meet the needs of stakeholders and community members, reducing inequalities in high-speed Internet access.
Projects and Resources
- Access all of III’s public code bases and tools for internet measurement on GitHub
- NetMicroscope
- BEAD Challenge
- FLOTO Data
Team
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Nick Feamster
Faculty Director of Tech Policy, Data Science Institute; Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and the College; Faculty Co-Director, Internet Innovation -
Nicole Marwell
Associate Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; Faculty Co-Director, Internet Innovation -
Tarun Mangla
Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi -
Jesse London
Software Engineer, Data Science Institute -
Jonatas Marques
Postdoctoral Scholar, Data Science Institute -
Taveesh Sharma
PhD Student, Department of Computer Science
Nick Feamster is a Neubauer Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College and the Faculty Director of Tech Policy for the Data Science Institute. He researches computer networking and networked systems, with a particular interest in Internet censorship, privacy, and the Internet of Things. His work on experimental networked systems and security aims to make networks easier to manage, more secure, and more available.
Nicole Marwell is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Sociology, a faculty fellow at the Center for Spatial Data Science, and a member of the Faculty Advisory Council of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Her research examines urban governance, with a focus on the diverse intersections between nonprofit organizations, government bureaucracies, and politics.
DSI Postdoctoral Scholar 2020-2023
Tarun Mangla joined DSI as a postdoctoral scholar in summer 2020, and was previously a PhD student in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, co-advised by Mostafa Ammar and Ellen Zegura. His research interests span video streaming, network measurements, and cellular networks. He completed his bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (2014) and MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech (2018). He is a recipient of the Best Paper Award at IFIP TMA, 2018.
Jesse London is a software engineer at the Data Science Institute, where he contributes to open source initiatives.
Jonatas A. Marques joined DSI as a postdoctoral scholar in July 2023, and was previously a PhD student in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, Brazil), advised by Luciano Paschoal Gaspary. His current research interests are on the intersection of machine learning and computer networking, with focus on programmable networking and network management. Jonatas is part of the Internet Equity Initiative at DSI, with the goal of measuring and analyzing Internet performance and reliability to address inequity in U.S. communities.
Projects
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