11.S188/11.S952 - Hack the City: Data Science for Public Good

MIT Subject Page

What do you want to know, if you have access to information about anything in a city? The instrumenting of environment and digitization of society provide rich resources for data science applications, but are we utilizing data for good? This IAP workshop introduces computational thinking and data science practice related to data in cities. Lectures include principles, techniques, and real- world applications of data science for urban problem-solving. Through hands-on exercises and tutorials, students build mini projects (individual or team) with fun data sources, create playful visualization, and formulate applied data science questions for a positive social impact. Each session includes a lecture and a data computing workshop so students develop coding skills and data science intuition to work with various urban data.

Key learning objectives include 1) Apply basic computing skills to solve real-world problems in Python; 2) Learn how to develop reproducible and responsible computing solutions; and 3) Gain high-level understandings of urban science. This subject provides an overview of urban data computing and emerging applied science for cities. Overall, it provides a roadmap for students who like to apply computational thinking and data science skills to explore meaningful real-world urban problems.