The emergence of social networks offers us an unprecedented opportunity to understand how our cities are constructed by showing us where we are connected and where we are divided. Since 2007 Dave Troy has been building maps to try to help us see cities differently: not as streets and buildings, but as a set of relationships and interactions between people. There are many implications to this work in fields ranging from urban planning to policing, economic development, and social justice. Currently this work is being done with fairly modest datasets, but with expanded coverage (Dave’s recent TED talk; 815K+ views) , additional, larger datasets are becoming available which require additional processing capacity. Dave will discuss the current state of the work, including some of the more interesting problems he faces, including scaling to map very large cities, presenting changes over time, and further automating the visualization process. He will discuss some possible avenues for exploration involving large scale map-reduce approaches to performing calculations such as community detection and graph layout. He is actively seeking collaborators who are be interested in working on these difficult challenges.
Speaker Biography
Dave Troy (JHU ’96) is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently CEO, co-founder, and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tool Mailstrom.co. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,” curated by Paola Antonelli. His new crowdsourced project Peoplemaps.org uses social network data to map cities. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic and is passionate about data, cities, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.