Can Big Data Prevent Unnecessary Police Shootings?

In September 2016, Keith Lamont Scott sat in a parked SUV outside an apartment complex in Charlotte, N.C. As he rolled a joint with a handgun at his side, police officers arrived to serve someone else a warrant. What happened next — a confused and unplanned altercation with the police…multiple warnings to drop his gun…the screams of Scott’s wife who filmed it all…and shots that killed him — is the kind of policing incident data scientists are now trying stop with so-called early intervention systems.  
Their aim: to identify which officers might be at risk of unnecessarily pulling the trigger in a high-adrenaline situation as a result of prior events they might have experienced.
“We don’t want officers to feel like they’re being tagged because they’ve been bad,” says Crystal Cody, technology solutions manager for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. “It really is an early intervention system.”
To be clear, early intervention systems are not new. For years, police chiefs have paged through documentation of officers’ personal and professional histories to help identify cops who might need to be pulled off their beat and brought back to headquarters. Charlotte, where mass demonstrations raged in the city’s central business district after Lamont’s death, will be among the first cities to use a version that utilizes machine learning to look for patterns in officer behavior. If its approach of data collection proves to be successful, other police departments will be able to feed their stats into the model and procure predictions for their city.
Responding to a number of stressful calls is highly correlated with leading to an adverse event, says University of Chicago data scientist Joe Walsh. He points to the widely seen video of the North Texas cop tackling a black girl at a pool party as an example. Earlier that shift, the officer had responded to two suicide calls.
When used as intended, experts say these intervention systems should reduce instances such as this. Police departments are advised to have them, but they aren’t required by law. Historically burdened by poor design and false positives, agencies nationwide have largely discredited theirs and let them languish. According to a Washington Post story last year, Newark, N.J., supervisors gave up on their system after just one year. In Harvey, a Chicago suburb, management tracked only minor offenses (like grooming violations) without notching the number of lawsuits alleging misconduct. And in New Orleans, cops ridiculed the ineffective system, considering it a “badge of honor” to be flagged.
“I think a lot of [police departments] give lip service to it because it’s important to have one, but they don’t really use it,” says criminologist Geoffrey Alpert.
In Charlotte, where the force is reputed to be technologically savvy, the internal affairs division built an early intervention system around 2004. It flagged potentially problematic cops by noting the number of use-of-force incidents, citizen complaints and sick days in a row. Analyzing those data points, 45 percent of the force was marked for review. “It was clear that [the warning system] over-flagged people,” Cody says.
At the same time, the simplistic method failed to identify the cop working a day shift with three use-of-force incidents as more at risk than an officer with the same record walking the streets of a tough neighborhood at night.
Charlotte is now giving the system a second try via a partnership with young data scientists affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy. The new version assigns each officer a score that’s generated by analyzing their performance on the beat — data that most police departments are reticent to hand over to researchers.

Data scientists from the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy are using machine learning to predict which police officers are at-risk of unnecessarily pulling the trigger.

After crunching the numbers (more than 20 million records, to be exact), the officers that are more likely to fire their weapon are, not surprisingly, those who have breached department protocol or recently faced particularly intense situations on their beats, says Walsh, the data science team’s technical mentor. So far, this 2.0 version has improved the identification of at-risk cops by 15 percent and has reduced incorrect misclassification by half.
It’s important to note that the databases are not meant to be used as rap sheet of an officer’s performance — nor are they to be used as a disciplinary tool. Conceptually, if the system is effective, it will flag a potential crisis before it occurs and help keep officers safe. NationSwell reached out to the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association in North Carolina, but neither responded to requests for comment.
“We look at the results in context of the history of that officer, where they work and what behaviors they’ve had in the past before we say, yes, this looks like a valid alert. We’re still giving humans the ability to look at it, instead of giving all the power to the computer,” says Cody.
Charlotte residents, for their part, expressed optimism about the system. “We think it’s important to have some type of outside audit,” says Robert Dawkins, state organizer for the SAFE Coalition NC, a group focused on police accountability.
The department isn’t promising the system will be a perfect solution, and it’s well aware it has plenty of jaded officers it needs to persuade. But as the system continues to gather new data — finding out which cops it overlooked or overreacted to — the model’s accuracy should improve, Walsh says. With man and machine taking a more rigorous look at the data, both law enforcement and citizen will be better protected.
MORE: 5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens

Building a Better City Through Big Data

In the nation’s capital, 28 percent of children live in a household that’s below the federal poverty line, and another 20 percent grow up barely above it. As executive director of DC Action for Children, NationSwell Council member HyeSook Chung studied exactly where this deprivation could be found and, more importantly, why. “What are we doing that’s not working, and why are we investing in it?” she asks repeatedly. Unlike the ideological think tanks that populate D.C.’s corridors, she’s a relentless empiricist who searches for answers in data. At DC Action, she partnered with DataKind and joined the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count community to publicly post a number of visuals about the city online, graphically comparing, say, youth unemployment, Medicaid enrollment or the number of parks in every D.C. neighborhood. Last month, Chung accepted a new role as D.C.’s deputy mayor for health and human services. As she makes the transition, NationSwell caught up with her to discuss the data-driven accomplishments at her last job and reflect on what her new role means for the city.
How does better data guide decision-making in Washington, D.C.?
At DC Action, we were the first ones to really look at the neighborhood level. Looking at wards — the equivalent of a county level — was too broad. As a parent, I live in D.C. and my kids go to DCPS, and I wanted to know why parents in certain areas were able to move the needle, despite the lack of support from the city’s administrative offices. With neighborhood data, we could question why a cluster of a few elementary schools were doing better than all the others in that ward. It could be race or income, but I wanted to know exactly why.
That led to visual analysis and asset-mapping that we can show a council member. “Look at grocery stores and the lack of fresh produce in Wards 7 and 8. Look at the poverty in Wards 1, 4 and 5 that’s starting to kick up.” We were able to have a different conversation with city leaders. Some of the big fights in the city are about state representation and all the things happening on the Hill, so I don’t think they were ready for an organization to show up with data on the neighborhood level. Because then, the solutions are really localized solutions, not these macro, citywide policies. That’s a different way of thinking: One solution is not going to meet the needs of all 108,000 kids under 18.
There’s been a lot of debate about how data can be misused. How do you avoid trusting misleading figures or building biased algorithms?
Data is not so black and white, especially in human resources. People dealing with people is very subjective. How can you have an automated evaluation for hiring or firing? In public education, there’s this drive for outcomes in test scores that need to be improved if the teacher is to be effective. I heard from one teacher who scored 6 percent [in his evaluations] one year, then 97 percent the next. The educator said that nothing changed; the calculations were just different those two times. Their salaries, pensions, even their jobs are determined by these equations some person is putting together. That is one thing about open data about which we have to be conscientious.
As the repository for Kids Count at DC Action, we focused on making sure we had the most up-to-date, reliable, unbiased data out there, but we also kept track of how that data is used. We all have biases that data can further or can debunk. We took our role very seriously to be as unbiased as we could, to give as much context as we could, then let the data speak for itself.
How can service providers change their operations to keep better track of their data?
I was training a few of the intake coordinators at one community-based organization, and I walked them through why everything they do is so important to track. I referenced Amazon: As a user, every movement, every click is tracked to give me popups based on what I might like. For nonprofits, the only difference is you meet families and children every day, and you have all these interactions and conversations. But none of that is being recorded or tracked. One of the pitfalls of social finance data is that we’re very great about tracking quantities and caseloads, like how many families you served or how many kids graduated, but we’re not so good about tracking progress or the quality of services. That’s been something I’ve been pushing recently: It shouldn’t be about how many preschool slots we have, because we have to narrow down how many of those are quality. They’re not all equal. We’re trying to set a new bar. Caseloads are not enough information to show progress.

HyeSook Chung speaks in 2015 on the Books From Birth Bill, which provides a free book to D.C. children each month from birth to age 5.

DC Action, in making public data widely available, is really just scratching the surface on the reams of information agencies could collect. What does the future look like if the public sector fully embraces this tool?
Can you imagine what the impact would be on the social-service sector if we had real-time data? It’s profound: Netflix and Amazon are able to adjust, in a matter of seconds, based on consumer knowledge. At nonprofits, we have a long way to go to embrace that and redefine accountability. Of course, it’s not truly transferrable from the private sector, but our decisions about service delivery could be much more engaged and responsive to live information from a family. We have to be careful; we don’t want to profile. But how do we translate, with these ethical and business questions in mind, those insights to the social sector to be more effective for families? That’s my interest. I want to get to a place where we can say, “Because of this investment here, we had this result.” It’s not about money; it’s about how we use the resources we have. If a program is not improving outcomes, have the courage and the data to adapt it. We’re not quick enough, and that’s frustrating to me. I just don’t know why we are in this rut of not giving our kids what they deserve.
How do you define leadership?
Two words come to mind: integrity and resiliency. Being an executive director is really hard work. I’ve made decisions, I’ve dealt with funding changes, I’ve let go of friends and fired people. At the end of the day, if my integrity is intact, I can go to bed, knowing I did the best I could. There were plenty of times I cried a lot and had to make hard decisions. But the work continues, because the bottom line is kids need us. The mission keeps us moving.
Why did you decided to take a new job in city administration?
At DC Action, we were called upon by the mayor’s executive offices to help make data-informed decisions. In many ways, we were partners in an advisory capacity helping departments achieve results and made decisions based on outcomes, not simply compliance. After meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser, I knew [this job] was another wonderful opportunity to push our starting principles to a much larger scale. The mayor invited me into the administration to help highlight the critical importance of data-driven work for some of the toughest challenges we have before us as a city: homelessness and reform of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits.  As a public servant, I am thrilled to be asked to think more strategically and systematically about how we can truly make a difference in the lives of our residents in need.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.

The Woman That’s Using Big Data to Solve Fertility Problems

Before Piraye Beim began collecting and analyzing big data on women’s fertility, doctors had little concrete direction to give to the 7 million American women who have trouble getting pregnant. But her company Celmatix, which she founded in 2009 after earning a doctorate in molecular biology from New York’s Cornell University, uses a woman’s medical history to identify the treatment most likely to lead to conception. Since launching last year, it’s served 20,000 patients. NationSwell spoke to Beim about the challenges of starting a company as a female academic during a time when male college dropouts dominate Silicon Valley’s narrative.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I’ve been given advice that there are different ways to be a leader and that recognizing what kind of leader I’m good at being would be helpful. Imagine a general who’s barking out commands and helping people get up on the hill. That’s really good in that situation, but maybe not a good leadership style or strategy for other situations.
What’s on your nightstand?
I’m reading “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” an autobiography by Carrie Brownstein, an actress on the TV show “Portlandia.” I knew her as one of the three members of the indie band Sleater-Kinney, and their music really got me through grad school. It’s this kind of girl power rock band that broke through a lot of the stereotypes in rock and roll. Their songs address things that are relevant to women and to world events. It’s been fun to read this story. It transports me from these songs that were so influential to me to where they came from.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I think girls are in right now. I watched the Democratic National Convention, and it’s just girl power. It’s a great time to be building a women’s health product and a women’s health company. One of the challenges of entrepreneurship is that, by definition, disruptive technologies mean that you see something before other people see it. When I founded Celmatix seven and a half years ago, to me, it was such a no-brainer that women’s health was being underserved, that if we could decode the genetic basis of reproductive conditions and reproductive function in women, we could unlock so much and impact lives so profoundly by enabling women to be proactive in managing their health.
But what’s been interesting about the arc of the company is it feels like not only is the industry catching up to the fact that women’s health really matters and that women are an important demographic from a market standpoint, but that the zeitgeist of the world feels like it’s catching up too. Sometimes you feel in your little piece of the fishbowl that there’s a phenomenon happening in women’s health, but what I realized is that it’s part of the overall women’s empowerment, whether it’s Malala [Yousafzai] being outspoken about educating women and becoming a household name and now Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination. It’s been very interesting to feel that these confluences are stitched into the overall fabric of the world at the moment, that women have so much potential and the world would benefit so much from unleashing that. For us, where we stay grounded in our piece of the puzzle is that women can’t ever fully unleash that potential if they aren’t fully able to manage their health.
What inspires you?
One analogy that I’ve made is I feel like a knight that goes into battle and he’ll put the handkerchief from his sweetheart into his armor, tucked away. Since I’ve founded Celmatix, I have not been to a single dinner party or networking event where someone did not, probably with tears in their eyes, share a story about their miscarriage or how they’re struggling or their failed IVF [in vitro fertilization] cycle. It’s one of those things that’s so pervasive. For most people who are going through fertility struggles or for women who are struggling with the decision to freeze their eggs, they don’t have anyone to talk to about it. There’s not an outlet or forum. I feel like a knight going into battle, and I feel like all of those people I’ve met, I just keep shoving those handkerchiefs into my armor until it’s bursting. In those moments where I don’t feel strong, I’m bolstered by knowing I can’t give up now.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
The moments that are poignant and really moments of strength for me are when we’ve had employees go through a life event like a death in the family or maternity leave. We’ve been able to build this product in a way that people felt supported along the way. That nuance is very important for me. When a mother comes back from maternity leave and says, “This time with my child was such a gift,” or when we give somebody flexibility to work part-time and that allows them to flourish.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish they had told me that I had it in me to do it. People have written about how women tend to be a bit more cautious in whether they’re qualified to do something. When you first get started and you’re coming from my position where I had no business background, coming into this as an academic scientific researcher, I assumed that I didn’t have the DNA and that I’d need to make up for my decisions along the way. To some extent, you do that. You hire experts and people with MBAs. But three years in, I realized, wait a minute, I am an entrepreneur. I totally have entrepreneur DNA. It took me a little while to get that self-confidence, but the company did a lot better once I owned it and said, I’ve got this. I can totally do this.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photograph courtesy of Celmatix.
MORE: 4 Out of 5 Black Women Are Overweight. This Group Has the Solution — and They Are on the March

Forget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting

Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for investigative video reportage like Sen. George Allen using the obscure racial insult “macaca” and a way to mobilize millions, such as President Obama and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video). Today, as head of Google’s News Lab, he’s enthused about virtual reality and big data becoming an integral part of storytelling. NationSwell spoke to Grove from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters about the future of newsrooms.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
[T]o make it something that you practice, not something that you are. I tell my team at Google all the time, “You’re all leaders.” What I mean by that (this comes from some books I’ve read, a few classes I’ve taken and also my own experience) is leadership is helping a group that is facing a challenge grapple with it in an honest and productive way. It’s really getting to the root of what a problem is, engaging in various interventions or techniques to really get to the core issue they’re trying to solve. Great leaders are able to exercise leadership, not just embody it.

What’s on your nightstand?
I just finished a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which is about the modern economy and how technology has actually, in some ways, made us more distant from the actual work-product. The guy who wrote it was a motorcycle mechanic, and he talks about the power of working with your hands and how the trades are actually a really active way to use your mind and develop yourself. It’s not just an argument for, hey, you need to go start your own mechanic shop, but that you should understand how the things you own work.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
There are all kinds of new storytelling devices that are making journalism and frontiers really hopeful. While getting traffic to your site is a challenge and thinking about catchy titles or even clickbait is part of a conversation, deeper, more immersive storytelling is even more exciting and differentiates your site or broadcast. Virtual reality’s a part of that. You’re not just clicking and leaving: you dive into it. But another really interesting development (we’re not quite there yet) is journalism via drones. It’s really powerful for things like crisis response… and climate journalism — looking at ways different ecosystems have changed and are changing from above. It’s just a totally new perspective. There’s lots of challenges to figure out there ethically and technologically, but that’s exciting.

Data journalism itself is probably one of the biggest frontiers for journalism right now. It takes a massive amount of computing power that we now have, the extraordinary access to data sets we didn’t have before and a shift of how newsrooms think about telling stories. We, of course, work on Google data in that space, but ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, The UpShot, Vox — they’re all really innovative data-driven journalism. That’s one of the things we’re betting big on: that data journalism has a huge potential for making readers around the world smarter about topics they’re discovering. Newsrooms are beginning to understand there’s never been a better time to be a storyteller, given the tools they have.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish somebody had told me to lead with passion and manage with consistency. A lot of leaders are very good at one, but not the other. They can crisply manage a spreadsheet, a meeting schedule, a document and metrics tracker, but they don’t have the vision or the passion to lead an organization. Other leaders give the inspiration and purpose. That’s great, but the management piece falls off a little bit, because it’s harder for them to operationally develop things. Most leaders need to have both. I wish someone had defined that for me. I came into my work with the former — the passion and excitement — and I don’t think I was incapable of the latter, but I didn’t know when to toggle between the two.

What inspires you?
What’s most inspiring to me about my time at Google is amplifying stories or voices that wouldn’t have otherwise been heard. You look at YouTube as a platform for that, or the Internet in general as a chance to discover stories that wouldn’t have otherwise made it into our conversations — that’s a really powerful additive element of technology in media. Whether that’s citizen-captured videos from streets of the Arab Spring or whether that’s someone “coming out” to their community on a blog or whether that’s a kid in his bedroom in Philly or a mom in her house in Montana getting to ask the President a question in a Google+ Hangout, there’s all kinds of elements that plays itself out.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing experiences at Google. But if I had to pick something I was most proud of, I might go back to before I was a journalist, in my early twenties, when I spent about half a year in India. I just sort of went; I didn’t know anybody there. I bought a plane ticket and landed in Bombay [now Mumbai]. I wanted to do something that went beyond being a tourist, but I didn’t know what. I ended up finding the opportunity to work for an organization that did interventions in small rural Indian towns to try to get 30,000 people above the poverty line. They would help these people grow mango forests or cross-breed cows to create their own dairies. I [wrote] profiles of the people who this group was helping. I got to spend two months in rural villages, finding my own translators, talking to different people who were in these situations. It wasn’t the best journalism or work I’d ever done, but early in my career, it was a really transformative experience.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

Home page photo courtesy of Steve Grove.

MORE: The Software That Could Enable Drones to Go Mainstream

4 Startups Revolutionizing How Food Is Produced in the U.S.

Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.

Drones

Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”

The Henlight helps chickens maintain high egg production levels, even during winter months. Courtesy of Edward Silva.

Solar Power

To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”

Graduate student Donald Gibson in his greenhouse. Courtesy of Donald Gibson.

Genetics

Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.

Data Analytics

FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
 
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis) 
 

Tomorrow’s Energy-Saving Neighborhood Is Being Built Today in Texas

America’s most futuristic neighborhood is being built, perhaps surprisingly, in Texas.
Under construction in Austin, the Lone Star State’s liberal enclave, is a residential development boasting rooftop solar panels, electric vehicle charging stations and meters to measure the electricity usage of every appliance. Known as the Mueller neighborhood, the community is “smart grid experiment” where the Pecan Street research consortium brought together experts from universities and utilities alike to provide real-world data for one of the most important ecological questions of our time: How can we reduce our energy and water consumption?
“There was virtually no data available on appliance-level electric use. We were trying to determine if testing certain things out, like electric cars or home energy-management systems would affect people compared to how they used electricity before they got access to this stuff,” says Brewster McCracker, Pecan Street’s president and CEO. “There was not only no data on that but nothing on the market that would measure that. We spent a long time working with suppliers and configuring things to measure appliance use every minute 365 days a year.”
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Energy usage by homeowners and businesses fluctuates wildly, accounting for 41 percent of all consumption. To be more environmentally friendly, McCracken says, we need to think about reducing our use during peak times, as well as what will use less total energy. That’s why Pecan Street’s live data is so important for measuring exactly what appliances are putting heavy demands on the system. Its analytics can tell you that an electric vehicle charger puts the same load on the grid as a clothes dryer — both far less than an air conditioner. Previously, no one tested the kind of impact that a dozen electric vehicles on one block, let alone an entire neighborhood.
Through a mobile app, the research team informs customers of specific ways to reduce energy like, say, unplugging the microwave. Those suggestions have led to a 10 percent reduction in electricity use, McCracken, a former two-term member of the Austin city council, says. Overall, the Mueller neighborhood uses 38 percent less electricity on heating and cooling than their less green neighbors.
The stats help plan better infrastructure for an entire region. Conventional wisdom, for instance, holds that south-facing solar panels will absorb the most sunlight. Which is true generally, McCracken says, but energy companies should know that west-facing photovoltaic panels will absorb more energy during late summer afternoons when need is greatest, his team found.
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Additionally, Pecan Street can detect when something seems amiss on an individual home. “We found that people who have solar panels have minor maintenance issues, but they didn’t have any way to learn about them,” McCracken says. “By having that data, we were able to isolate the solar panels that are turned off. Other things could be more subtle. A single fuse that’s blown could produce at a reduced level. We have the data analytics running to detect that. It’s not something that you could stare at a rooftop or look at the electricity bill to see that happened, but better data helps.”
The research institute’s data collection has been so unique that other energy companies throughout the country have invited it to study their neighborhoods. Pecan Street now gathers stats from more than 1,200 homes, primarily clustered in Texas, Colorado and California, and ships the data out to 138 universities in 37 countries.
“We have strong reason to believe that access to better data and better information enhances our ability to solve problems,” McCracken says. “If we have better data on weather patterns, we can help people be safe in storms. If we have better data on car performance, we can make cars that work better.” With a hotter planet, drought in the West and superstorms along the East Coast, this Texan neighborhood couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time.

How Mapping Health Data Can Reduce Childhood Obesity

There is no blanket solution when it comes to fighting childhood obesity, especially in an urban setting where diverse cultures, economic disparity and access to parks and fitness activities can create a complex web of challenges.
Add insight from an abundance of community stakeholders including educators, parents and local lawmakers and finding a single solution to combatting the problem is near impossible. But an Austin, Texas, nonprofit may have found the key to getting everyone’s attention when it comes to understanding the problem: Visualization.
Children’s Optimal Health (COH) is charged with improving health for the city’s youth, but the nonprofit discovered that identifying the problem meant looking at the issue on a neighborhood level. Thanks to a Texas law that requires public schools to record fitness data on every student, COH used the information to create maps that identify “hotspots” that include social and economic information, according to Government Technology.
“You don’t have to know English or have an education to see this and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my neighborhood,’” said COH Executive Director Maureen Britton.
Through data-sharing agreements with more than 12 central Texas education and health entities, COH aggregates student information including BMI and cardiovascular fitness scores, geo-tagged by neighborhood. Student names are removed and the data is completely anonymous — focusing only on identifying the issues families in these local communities face. As the Austin tech sector continues to bring more business and more people to town, COH is committed to ensuring low-income residents don’t fall by the wayside.
“There’s not enough attention paid to the struggles in Austin as the population outside of the tech industry grows. That’s our concern,” Britton said. “The more we bring this data to life through the maps, the more we get data-driven information to the right people.”
COH is also able to overlay the student health maps with other data sets, creating more granular narratives to show how the city can improve wellness initiatives. For example, a neighborhood’s proximity to a concentration of fast food restaurants or a community’s crime rate could contribute to the area’s obesity rate.
But perhaps it’s COH’s ability to network institutions that may otherwise not collaborate that might be most impressive about the nonprofit, as Government Technology points out. For example, getting hospitals involved in changing school physical education curriculum or schools to engage in interventions for existing infrastructure are just a few examples of how COH has found a way to get all community stakeholders on the same page.
As more cities collaborate on civic innovation initiatives, officials should take note the power of a picture and how it can reshape the conversation.
MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work

When Flames Threaten, Big Data Predicts Where Wildfire Will Spread Next

As wildfires continue to grip much of Northern California and southern Oregon, firefighters are scrambling to contain the flames while officials are organizing evacuations.
Wildfires spread fast, and a change of wind can make it difficult to track where the flames are moving, which is why computer scientists at the University of San Diego are tapping big data to help forecast the path of destruction in real time.
WIFIRE, a cyber infrastructure system, uses weather sensors and satellite images to analyze the progress of a wildfire and where it’s likely to move in real-time — helping firefighters to make better decisions, according to InformationWeek.
Though WIFIRE is still being developed, the goal is to scale a version that could be used elsewhere in the country where communities are dealing with the natural disaster. In fact, recent reports have found wildfires are growing more intense and more destructive across the western United States.

“Imagine that you could have a detailed model of a wildfire path and you could actually compute the progress of the flames faster than real time and provide advanced warning to the first responders,” says Larry Smarr, a computer scientist with the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology.

This type of technology is precisely what could help reduce the financial toll a wildfire takes on a community after the ashes have settled. For example, the 2003 Cedar Fire in Southern California, the largest in the state’s history, left an estimated $2 billion worth of damages.

Though it’s currently a local project in San Diego, some pilot applications are currently available, according to Ilkay Altintas, director for the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, who is heading the project.

Scientists are planning to make WIFIRE  available to users through a web interface with real-time alerts sent to receivers before, during and after a fire. The potential would give authorities a leg up on organizing evacuations and putting emergency responders in place to prevent the spread of fires similar to the one blazing through Northern California.
MORE: You Can’t Fight Wildfires Without Water — and Colorado Is Thirsty

How San Francisco Is Tapping Big Data to Measure Neighborhood Sustainability

What comes to mind when you think of San Francisco? If you’re like most, it’s the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatrez prison, and liberal social views.
But you should also think about San Francisco’s civic technology. The City by the Bay is often considered a trendsetter in this field — and now, it’s enlisting help from the Midwest to help engineer its latest investment in a digital government tool.
Partnering with the University of Chicago, San Francisco’s Citywide Planning Division is creating a neighborhood dashboard to measure each community’s sustainability by measuring statistics such as energy, water usage, materials management, health, local habitat, community investment and mobility, according to Government Technology.
The “Sustainable Systems Framework” will regularly update metrics on individual neighborhoods through department datasets, which will then give insight on future urban development and resource management, according to city planner Lisa Chen.
While a variety of components inspired the framework’s design, Chicago’s WindyGrid provided a template for San Fran’s system. WindyGrid is an open-sourced data hub that stores seven million rows of data in real-time across the city’s departments and is considered one of the largest municipal data ventures of its kind.
Matthew Gee, the U of Chicago’s project coordinator and a member of the team that developed WindyGrid, explains that San Francisco’s deployment of the technology could provide data-driven accountability for individual neighborhoods for the first time in its history.

“That kind of insight into how local programs, initiatives and investments have changed and improved the area around us hasn’t been possible in the past — or at least openly available — and that’s really exciting,” Gee said.

But building the technology is the easy part. Coordinating datasets and mapping out communities pose major challenges to the groundbreaking project. The university will help city officials comb through department data to extract the most meaningful stats to use in sustainable metrics, which entails even minute pieces like block parties or historic preservation.

While breaking down neighborhoods may seem like an easy task, mapping will take more into account than zip codes or geographical borders. Instead, the project team will separate neighborhoods by eco-districts as well as communities that share residential, commercial and industrial traits. These defined terms were first employed by Portland in 2010, and Chen contends the methodology is well-researched.

“Getting agencies to coordinate efforts even in a single neighborhood can be a real challenge,” Chen said, “and I think having performance metrics is one way to really engage agencies as well as the broader community.”

San Francisco will join more than 20 cities to begin exploring the idea of governing tactics by similar areas rather than one centralized plan for the whole city, The beta version is expected to roll out by the end of the first quarter in 2015, and residents will be able to check out a public version shortly after.

“We want this to be a demonstration project that shows cities the power of data and citizen-facing technologies that change the way cities grow,” Gee said.

MORE: How San Francisco Got Its Residents to Care About Sewers

From Convict to Coding: How One Man is Connecting America’s Inmates

Some of Silicon Valley’s best ideas come about through unusual circumstances. (Case in point: Facebook, which has its origins as a classmate ratings site.) But perhaps one of the more profound examples of this comes from Frederick Hutson, who cooked up his winning concept while behind bars.
Hutson always had a proclivity for business, launching anything from a window-tinting concept out of high school to opening a cell phone store. But his misstep came in 2007 at the age of 24, when he decided to help a friend create a more streamlined plan for marijuana distribution from Mexico to Florida through his mail service business. Though he received an honorable discharge from the Air Force and had no previous criminal record, Hutson was sentenced to 51 months in prison.
It was during his time as an inmate that Hutson came up with the idea for Fotopigeon, an online platform that lets friends and families of inmates upload photos to send through the postal service for 50 cents per print. As Hutson explained to the New York Times, prison officials often refuse anything from third party companies like Snapfish or Shutterfly “because they don’t like anything that doesn’t come in a plain white envelope.”

The concept seemed simple, but Hutson believed something as basic as helping inmates feel more connected to the outside world was a chance to reduce recidivism.

“Isolation is the worst thing for an inmate,” Hutson said. “It makes it hard for him to rebuild his life when he gets out.”

As an insider, Hutson knew that the average prisoner had just $300 a year to spend on goods at the prison commissary and for phone calls. (Families of inmates spend an additional $600 annually on their loved one.) Hutson believed that if he could market to prisoners directly and get 10 percent of their family and friends to send 10 photos a month (plus provide inexpensive phone calls), he could bring in $22 million in revenue within three years.

This insider knowledge proved to be a huge asset.

“I thought my record would prevent people from doing business with us, but it was just the opposite,” Hutson said. “I had domain expertise.”

While honing his concept at NewME, a San Francisco-based accelerator that focuses on underrepresented demographics in the tech world, Hutson and his investors realized that the platform could provide much more to the untapped market of 2.3 million inmates across the country. And so Pigeonly was born. 

Pigeonly now operates as an online data platform that not only offers photo-sharing services through Fotopigeon, but also cheap phone calls for inmates through its telecommunications arm, Telepigeon. How does it do it? The company partnered up with Internet phone-service providers to give inmates local access numbers that can be used to make long-distance calls — reducing rates from 23 centers per minute to 6 cents.

But perhaps even more important than its two main services, Pigeonly has centralized the more than 35 million pieces of data on inmates that are dispersed in the fractured public records system across more than 3,000 prison institutions, according to the company site. While inmates are frequently shuffled around in the system, addresses are often lost or never updated. Customers can use the platform as a directory to look up an inmate by name, regardless of address.

Pigeonly has also opened up its application programming interface (API), which allows developers to use the data to build more products directed toward the unusual consumer market and their networks. As Hutson points out, incarceration impacts more than just the inmate, affecting a prisoner’s network of seven to 10 people on average. Communication with friends and family is proven to reduce recidivism, according to Hutson, and part of his goal of Pigeonly is to better understand who is affected by prison.

By opening up the difficult-to-reach market, he just might find out.

MORE: New York Enlists Venture Capitalists To Help Keep People Out of Prison