UIC researchers join national project to turn urban data into healthier cities

The past decade has seen a flood of data about cities, information with the potential to make communities cleaner, healthier and more livable.

University of Illinois Chicago scientists will play a key role in realizing that potential through a new computing platform they are building for researchers and the public that can be used in different cities and around the world.

The Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research, or OSCUR, will be a cohesive ecosystem of tools and resources to transform city data into knowledge and action. The multi-institutional collaboration was funded by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, with $1.75 million going to UIC.

Researchers from the UIC College of Engineering and College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs will work with investigators from New York University and the University of Washington. UIC will bring strengths in visual data analysis, civil engineering and government and community partnerships to design accessible computational tools for environmental justice, transportation and other public priorities.

“One of the key aspects is lowering the barriers to accessing this wealth of technologies we have been building over the past years,” said Fabio Miranda, assistant professor of computer science and UIC principal investigator on the project. “We’re creating analyses and visualizations that ensure that community members are aware of how they are impacted.”

A new foundation for city data collaboration

Chicago is a leader in urban data for public consumption. The City of Chicago Data Portal currently publishes over 600 datasets on topics such as crime, public health and transportation. A thriving civic technology community then uses this data to build resources such as the Chicago Health Atlas, a collaboration between UIC researchers, city agencies and software developers.

But many of these tools are siloed solutions built specifically for Chicago’s data, making them difficult to adapt to other locales and integrate with other areas of research. Technical challenges, too, often limit the translation of data into research and policy solutions, said Sybil Derrible, professor of civil, materials and environmental engineering at UIC and co-principal investigator on the project.

“Many cities and governments and industries are putting data out there, but it’s just very hard to use,” Derrible said. “Imagine if you hire the best chef in the world and give them the best ingredients, but you don’t give them any tools. No matter how good the chef is, if they don’t have the proper tools, they can’t make a good dish.”

The new platform will make it easier to combine data from multiple cities or datasets and build applications that use cutting-edge approaches such as machine learning and 3-D visualization.

For example, Miranda’s group has proposed approaches for mapping sidewalk networks and predicting where the shadows of large buildings will fall at different times of day and year — insights that are critical for improving urban mobility and accessibility. His group shares these systems through their Urban Toolkit, but the new platform would make it easier for cities to adapt those tools to their own needs or connect them with data on public transportation or weather, he said.

As part of the project, platform developers will work with researchers from different fields to assess their needs for using city data. UIC will recruit students from disciplines outside computer science for summer internships to test and refine new tools for urban planning, social science or public health. An annual workshop — scheduled to come to Chicago in 2028 and hosted at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory — will tackle specific urban challenges that can be addressed with city data and computing resources.

“We want to build a community so we can get people together and use these tools to share their knowledge and their research questions,” Derrible said.

Unleashing city data as a public resource

Beyond the scientific community, the OSCUR project also seeks to build useful tools for the public. That effort involves both technical challenges, such as designing user-friendly applications, and building relationships, said Federica Fusi, assistant professor of public policy, management and analytics at UIC.

“Because of their history, relationships between government and marginalized communities can be fraught with distrust — including distrust towards the data that government releases,” Fusi said. “You need to put time and effort into building something that is trustworthy and valuable for the community, in terms of allowing them to analyze the data in a way that matters to them.”

Miranda, Derrible and Fusi are working with communities on the South Side of Chicago to build data tools related to air pollution. Partnering with the Southwest Environmental Alliance — a coalition of groups from Pilsen, Little Village and other Chicago neighborhoods — the researchers will host events that introduce residents to key concepts in urban science and computing.

The community members will also have opportunities to work with UIC researchers and students on urban data projects to identify pollution sources and sustainability issues in their area.

“We’re going beyond what we have tackled before, into this new realm of environmental justice and the impact of climate change on communities,” Miranda said. “We are making sure that we have accurate data and accessible visualizations to highlight some of these disproportional impacts on neighborhoods.”