Paris Descartes University Seminar Series on Data Analytics
in collaboration with the diNo group

Invited Seminar Talk




Democratizing Urban Data Science
Prof Juliana Freire, New York University (USA)


when: 17 June 2019, 9am
where: room Turing Conseil, 7th floor, Paris Descartes University, 45 Rue Des Saints Peres, Paris 75006


Abstract

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 numerous spatio-temporal datasets containing information about diverse components of the cities, including their residents, infrastructure, and the environment. By analyzing the data exhaust from these components, we have the opportunity to better understand how they interact and obtain insights to help address important challenges brought about by urbanization with respect to transportation, resource consumption, housing affordability, and inadequate or aging infrastructure. While there have been successful efforts where data was used to improve operations, policies, and the quality of life for residents, these have been few and far between, because analyzing urban data often requires a staggering amount of work, from identifying relevant data sets, cleaning and integrating them, to performing exploratory analyses over complex, spatio-temporal data.
Our long-term research goal is to enable domain experts to crack the code of cities by freely exploring the vast amounts of urban data. In this talk, I will present methods and systems which combine data management, analytics, and visualization to increase the level of interactivity, scalability, and usability for urban data analysis.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, a Google Faculty Research award, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU, IBM Faculty Awards, NYU School of Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress.

Short Bio

Juliana Freire is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. She is the lead investigator and executive director of the NYU Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, the elected chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), and a council member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Her research interests are in large-scale data analysis, curation and integration, visualization, provenance management, and web information discovery. She has made fundamental contributions to data management methods and tools that address problems introduced by emerging applications including urban analytics and computational reproducibility. Freire has published over 180 technical papers, several open-source systems, and is an inventor of 12 U.S. patents. She has co-authored 5 award-winning papers, including one that received the ACM SIGMOD Most Reproducible Paper Award. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM. She received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.


Hosted by: Themis Palpanas

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