Clark and Lodato Unlock City Data

Posted September 13, 2017

What good is data if it can’t be easily accessed? And what can data from 10 or even 20 years ago tell us? These are the questions behind research by Jennifer Clark and Thomas Lodato at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy.

Associate Professor Jennifer Clark and Postdoctoral Fellow Thomas Lodato are unlocking city data to examine aging or obsolete legacy systems that house budget and spending data for the City of Atlanta. They are digitizing the data and migrating it to a more sustainable system. The data spans two decades starting in 1996. The researchers are also looking at how existing or older systems sync with new ones.

“All the discussion about smart cities tends to be about these emerging, new technologies, real-time sensors, and partnerships with applications that are providing data,” said Lodato, a research scientist with the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and the Center for Urban Innovation. “There’s this wealth of other data that exists that’s embedded in some sort of legacy system.”

To read the full story, which covers Georgia Tech researchers work on Connecting Crime and Smarter Travel, visit Georgia Tech’s “Smart Data Revolution” webpage.

The School of Public Policy is a unit in the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.