cicada tracker

Cicada Tracker and the Future of Citizen Sensing

The massive cicada bloom that spread across the eastern seaboard this spring is winding down, but its end heralds another gradually emerging entity: citizen sensing. The Cicada Tracker—a community data-gathering initiative for documenting the noisy insects’ emergence from their burrows—was a rousing success, and it should encourage data innovators across the country to think about what a few motivated citizens and some commodity hardware can do for their communities.

The tracker was devised at a hackathon by John Keefe, a data journalist working for New York public radio station WNYC. The device was a simple piece of open hardware, consisting of an Arduino microcontroller, a temperature sensor, LEDs, resistors and wiring.

For around $80 and some careful construction, it enabled ordinary folks to measure soil temperature, which is a reliable indicator for exactly when the cicadas will surface. After measuring the temperature, people could then send that data—along with their locations and eventually any cicada sightings—to the WNYC team, who created an interactive map to visualize the emerging swarm.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab reports that the Cicada Tracker …

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dowd

FedTalks 2013: Highlights and Observations

The FedTalks 2013 conference, held June 12 in Washington, brought together a motley crew of government officials, tech company executives, military contractors and civic IT experts to discuss “how technology and people can change government and our communities.” The speakers, ranging from Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) to famed impostor Frank Abagnale (more on him below) came from similarly broad backgrounds. Here is a quick rundown on some highlights and observations from the conference:

FedTalks, Innovators Listen

Challenge.gov, a federally-supported platform for civic innovation competitions, came up several times, including in U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel’s keynote address on increasing government efficiency. The site—itself a public-private partnership with technology competition company ChallengePost—encapsulates a theme that pervaded FedTalks 2013 and that’s particularly relevant in the data science sector: as long as government agencies lack the expertise to design and implement data collection mechanisms and disciplined analytics themselves, they will need to get help from external sources. Acting GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini made the excellent point that in addition to the value created by the winning entries on Challenge.gov and similar platforms, other contestants …

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continuum

Highlights From The National Day of Civic Hacking

The atmosphere after a hackathon is usually one of relief and mutual congratulation—“We finally made it,” the participants say, referring both to finishing their programs and reaching the end of the grueling event—but the real work takes place in the weeks and months that follow. That’s when the programmers, designers, and subject matter experts refine their work, hopefully planting the seed for a new business or public service.

Below are four standout projects that emerged from the National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH), which took place over the first two days of June in 95 locations around the United States. Besides celebrating their ingenuity, there are some lessons to be learned from each of them.

Spreading success stories in Chicago

In Chicago, an app called TowText lets users know if their car has been towed, and provides the phone number and address of the impound lot. The best part? Because of the City of Chicago has a standardized data-collection policy and a rapidly-updating database for relocated vehicles, TowText users get a message within fifteen minutes of their car being logged.

…

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A "hacker" speaks with members of the community at a Tulsa, Oklahoma event for the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hacker

When local news editors across America received tips that hackers would be gathering in their town over the weekend, they must have been alarmed. The events of the first National Day of Civic Hacking (NDCH) – held June 1-2 in 95 locations around the country – were benign, as anyone who has ever attended a similar meet-up might imagine, but that didn’t stop the flood of references to malware, identity theft and other computer security breaches in the news coverage.

In reality, the mission of the NDCH couldn’t have been more “white hat”:

“The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country.”

This wasn’t the sort of “hacking” that captured the popular imagination in the ‘80s and ‘90s; the NDCH events looked more like community service jamborees, with visits from small-town mayors and a few boxes …

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Kenneth Cukier

Book Review of “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think”

There have been a number of attempts to chronicle exactly what is “big data” and why anyone should care.  Last year’s The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt focused on telling the personal stories behind big data (and accompanied these stories with some great photographs). The year before, James Gleick wrote The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood which chronicled how information (and not just big data) has changed our world. The latest entrant is Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier which focuses heavily on explaining some of the more interesting impacts of living in a big data world. (Personally, I’m still not a fan of the term big data because 1) the term scares off people who think this is equivalent to “Big Oil” and 2) the term underrepresents the innovation happening around “small” data. But since this is the term used in the book, I’ll stick with it for this review.)

The first part of this book provides a …

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CIA Seal

Friday Roundup (03/22/2013)

This week Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s chief technology officer, spoke about the importance of leveraging data for the Agency’s mission at the GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference. He noted that, “the value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”

In health care, the Wall Street Journal reports that UC San Francisco is planning a major study on preventing and managing heart diseases using real-time data (rather than in-person clinical data) collected about volunteers using their smartphones, social media data, and special sensors. Individuals interested in participating can sign-up on the project website.

The Institute for Health Technology Transformation released a report “Transforming Health Care Through Big Data” which outlines opportunities for using data in health care, current challenges, and recommendations for how to better benefit from the use of …

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Sharon Biggar

5 Q’s on Data Innovation with Sharon Biggar

Sharon Biggar is the CEO of Path Intelligence, a company which is bringing online analytics to the offline world by providing retailers with real-time intelligence about how people move within buildings. I asked Sharon to share with me her thoughts on how this type of data will improve offline experiences for consumers.

Castro: You have an incredibly novel product with FootPath.  Can you briefly explain what it does?

Biggar: FootPath enables retailers and malls to optimize their space to improve shopper profitability.  Until now it has been challenging for shopping centers and retailers to understand and quantify how shoppers moved through their physical spaces, but with our FootPath solution retailers and malls can understand how many shoppers there are, how long they stay and where they go within the mall or store. For example, if shoppers visit the menswear section do they also visit kids wear?  Or if they visit Gap do they also visit Sears?  What happens if the mall or store owner moves these products or stores, how do shoppers react?  Our solution helps retailers and …

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Dave Fowler

Happy Data Innovation Day from Chartio

The following is a guest post from a Data Innovation Day partner. Originally posted on Chartio.

Today is the first annual data innovation day, which was started by the The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) to “raise awareness about the benefits and opportunities that come from increased use of information by individuals and the public and private sector.”

At Chartio that’s what we do every day, but we’re excited to participate with the many other partner organizations in highlighting this day and educating people on the industry.

There are many innovations happening in the data community. Many are focusing on handling and processing the increasing amounts of data being collected. At Chartio, we focus on the visualization, consumption and usability of data.

The future is increasingly data driven. Just as computers and the internet have worked their way into a more efficient and effective workplace, data and quantitative feedback and decision making are becoming an everyday part of the modern worker’s life.

We feel that the largest bottleneck in that revolution is the lack of …

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Data center

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition Celebrates Data Innovation Day

The following is a guest post from a Data Innovation Day partner. Originally posted on the Internet Infrastructure Coalition. 

As members of the Internet infrastructure industry, we often talk about new technologies and driving innovation for long-term growth of the Internet.  That innovation extends beyond traditional mediums and is being celebrated today with the first annual Data Innovation Day. The i2Coalition is proud to be a partner organization on this important occasion that is sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

The goal of Data Innovation Day is to highlight the opportunities surrounding increased access and usage of information. This year’s theme is fittingly “Big Data. Bigger Opportunities.” In today’s society, we are connected with virtually all the information we could possibly want for almost any industry, mainly because of the Internet.

The Internet infrastructure industry is the platform on which all this innovation is happening. Our industry provides a critical service that is fundamental to the Internet. From web hosting and data center providers to cloud computing services and software and service delivery, our …

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Euro coins

Your Invitation to Innovation: Save Europe!

The following is a guest post from a Data Innovation Day partner. Originally posted on StatSoft. Beyond the confines of a single organization, can the proper application of analyzed data produce tangible results powerful enough to save an entire economy? Innovative thinking says, “Why not?”

The story is told at StatSoft HQ about a pharmaceutical company that implemented our flagship product, STATISTICA, in its production facility, and our software soon identified a problem with a major batch. Production managers were able to halt production, fix the problem, and resume operation, thus averting a product disaster that could have cost millions of dollars. Rapid ROI for our customer? You bet! Money-saving events like this help many companies save jobs and remain competitive.

A well-planned analytics solution can optimize business processes with such rapidity that ROI is sometimes measured in weeks or months, not years. Expenses can be reduced. Jobs can be spared. Factories can be saved. In fact, everything we do at StatSoft is designed to help real people and organizations–and, thus, the world–become more productive.

So, it is …

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