Clark is Among Inaugural Recipients of Smart Cities Research Grant

Posted February 13, 2017

Jennifer Clark, an associate professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Public Policy, is a recipient of funding from the Institute for People and Technology’s (IPaT) Smart and Connected Communities Data Pilot Grant program. She is one of three Ivan Allen College faculty members to receive funding from the program — Carl DiSalvo and Chris Le Dantec, associate professors in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, have also been funded.

The pilot grants will fund one semester for recipients to further interdisciplinary research within the area of smart and connected communities. IPaT is supporting data-centric projects aiming to create new forms of smart city data, leverage and make available legacy city data, and prototype targeted uses of smart city data.

The grant program will result in new collections of smart city data that can be made available to the Georgia Tech research community and new prototypes for working with that data. Clark will receive $10,000 in funding.

Her research proposal can be found below. Learn more about the other grant recipients here: http://ipat.gatech.edu/2017-ipat-smart-connected-communities-data-pilot-grants

Making Legacy Data Available and Accessible for the Smart City
Jennifer Clark, Center for Urban Innovation
Thomas Lodato, Center for Urban Innovation

As a limited inquiry into these challenges and opportunities for legacy data, we propose exploring the process of digitizing and making accessible the budget and fiscal reporting data currently available from the City of Atlanta. The goals of this research are both practical and exploratory. Through this demonstration case, we will ascertain the cost and timeline for digitizing public data more generally as well as understand the challenges and opportunities incurred by making publicly available data operational for smart city systems through online databases and APIs. In short, the project addresses the problem of developing a process and method for converting data series, making data series available, and elaborating on policy issues related to smart cities data stewardship.