This is the archived SXSW 2012 schedule. Please see the current schedule here.

Austin 2032: Shaping Future Cities with Mobile Data

#sxsw #cityfuture

The ubiquity of mobile devices gives us an unprecedented view into human mobility. Smartphones of today provide precise information on location, orientation, and trajectories of their users. Study of anonymized, aggregate collections of data allow insight into human behavior that can greatly benefit our understanding of society while preserving individual privacy rights.

In this panel we discuss the promise and implications of analyzing mobile device data on a massive scale, specifically towards improving the cities of the future. The goal of almost any urban planner and policy maker is to make cities more user-friendly and more sustainable. Traditionally, improvement initiatives have slow feedback loops. Aggregate mobile data allows for fast understanding of the impact of any policy changes (such as installing bike lanes or congestion pricing), encouraging more of a test-and-learn environment, and ramping up city efficiency.

Our panel will contain a diverse set of people who can address different aspects of this issue: researchers and data analysts to discuss what we can learn from the data, network carriers to discuss the technologies and infrastructure needed, and policy makers who can address the potential impact of this data.

Listen

Presenters

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Alexander Howard Government 2.0 Correspondent for 
O’Reilly Media O Reilly Media

I work at O'Reilly Media, where I focus on learning and writing about the intersection of government, citizens and the Internet, sharing the voices, technologies and issues that matter in that space. I correspond for the O'Reilly Radar and have contributed to the National Journal, Forbes, the Huffington Post, Govfresh, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, CBS News' What's Trending, Govloop, Governing People, the Association for Computer Manufacturing and the Atlantic, amongst others. Quite a few people know me as "@digiphile" from my use of Twitter.

I am a frequent speaker and moderator at O'Reilly Media conferences and many other events in Washington and beyond, including the Web 2.0 Summit and Expo, , National Archives, DC Week, SXSWi, Strata, GOSCON, AMP Summit, Tech@State, and the State of the Net. I've also spoken at the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, NIST, Club de Madrid, Cato Institute, the National Archives and the Social Security Agency. In 2011, I was Visiting Faculty at the the Poynter Institute.

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Chris Volinsky Dir, Statistics Research AT&T Labs-Research

Chris Volinsky is Executive Director of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, N.J. Chris got his PhD from the University of Washington in 1997 studying Bayesian Model Averaging. He joined AT&T in 1997 and became Director of the Statistics Research Department in 2004. His research at AT&T focuses on large scale data mining: recommendation systems, social networks, statistical computation, and anomaly detection. In 2009, Chris was a member of the 7-person, 4-country team BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos that won the $1M Netflix Prize, an open competition for improving Netflix' online recommendation system.

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Chris Osgood Co-chair Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics Boston City Hall

Chris Osgood co-founded and co-chairs the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which is the City of Boston’s innovation incubator. The Office supports civic entrepreneurs – both inside and outside of City Hall – who have original ideas for how to improve Boston through collaborations between the public and the public sector.

Before joining the City of Boston in 2006, Chris earned his MBA from Harvard. Prior to that, he served for 5 years in the New York City Parks & Recreation Department as its Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor. Throughout his decade of experience in local government, Chris has focused on designing and implementing operations and policies that help cities engage with and respond to constituents.

An alum of both City Year and Haverford College, Chris was named a Public Official of the Year in 2011 by Governing Magazine.

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Eric Paulos Assoc Professor Carnegie Mellon University

Eric Paulos is the Director of the Living Environments Lab and an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute within the School of Computer Science and in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was Senior Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group - challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he helped launch a new robotic industry by developing some of the first internet tele-operated robots including Space Browsing helium filled blimps and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs). Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories.

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