• July 27, 2018
• Civic Data

Each week we will bring you a summary of what happened this week on our site, on Twitter, and in the wider world of civic data. Suggest stories on Twitter with #ThisWeekInData.

Data Philanthropy: Private Data for Public Good — The Urban Institute

Researchers from the Urban Institute recently released a report detailing best practices for companies interested in sharing their data to help improve public policies and services. The report details a number of pathways that companies can follow to share data in a secure manner, ranging all the way from the inhouse analysis to the public sharing of anonymized datasets. The report also includes a use case, namely a partnership between the Urban Institute and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, in which Mastercard provided the Institute anonymized transaction data for analysis.

Facial Recognition Gets Better as Debate Gets Louder — GovTech

Facial recognition technology is becoming ubiquitous, but the controversy over its ethical implications rages on. Concerns are wide-ranging. For instance, Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation fears that the surveillance enabled by facial recognition tech might deter protestors from participating in demonstrations, and the ACLU has asked Amazon to slow the sale of its Rekognition platform to law-enforcement agencies. Even Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer, has come out in support of federal regulation of the technology.

On the other side of the debate, Rick Myers, the executive director for the Major Cities Chiefs Association, argues that opponents’ concerns are misplaced, given that facial recognition can only be applied to videos and photographs taken in situations where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Thailand to roll-out national IoT network — Smart Cities World

CAT Telecom, a state-owned company in Thailand, aims to deploy Actility’s ThingPark wireless LPWA connectivity platform to power an IoT network in the city of Phuket. Colonel Sanpachai Huvanandana, the president of CAT Telecom, says that the new network will allow the city to cut costs in a number of areas through applications like smart lighting and smart metering, but the project is largely centered around tourism: Colonel Huvanandana plans for the network to gather data about tourist behavior and provide localized information about city attractions through a mobile application.

Nokia to partner with Current for smart cities platform in Canada — Smart Cities Dive

Nokia is partnering with Current, a GE subsidiary, to bring GE’s CityIQ platform to Canadian cities. The focus is on modifying streetlights with IoT sensors, which will gather infrastructure data and provide a platform for the development of apps addressing things like parking and air quality.

The partnership is part of a larger movement in Canada pushed forward by government funding and support. Justin Trudeau, the nation’s prime minister, stresses the need for cities to craft partnerships that find "[i]nnovative new ways to meet the needs of their citizens."

Launching the U.S. Open Data Toolkit – Center for Open Data Enterprise

The Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) recently launched the U.S. Open Data Toolkit, a website which compiles findings from 20 roundtables at which CODE brought government data providers together with data users to discuss strategies for making government data more accessible, usable, and relevant. The Toolkit includes a number of policies, resources, and best practices related to government data. CODE hopes that the Toolkit will become a “living resource” for the open government community and invites anyone to share ideas and input to further shape the resource.

Parking Has Eaten American Cities – Citylab

Using data taken from the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, and Google Maps, Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America created data visualization maps highlighting the density of parking spots in five major American cities. These maps are color coded to represent the amount of parking spots in specific regions, with green representing a low parking spot density and red a high density. When Scharnhorst compared parking density to housing density (households per acre), he discovered a surprising trend: With the exception of New York, every city had a higher overall density of parking than it did households.

The finding is counterintuitive for anyone who has ever struggled to find parking in a major American city, but this only further illustrates the extent of the inefficiency: Even when it seems like there isn’t nearly enough parking, there might already be far too much.

Las Vegas IT Systems Getting Troubleshooting Help from AI — GovTech

GovTech deems Las Vegas’s new AI-powered troubleshooting system an “IT help desk on steroids.” The system is built off of the FixStream platform, and is used to constantly monitor IT departments across the city, with an eye toward malfunctions and outages.

The need for high-powered IT troubleshooting increases as basic city services like traffic signaling and water systems become more technologically advanced.

“Because our systems are so complex now, and the demand for restoration of service when something goes wrong is so high… without using advanced artificial intelligence, there’s really no way that we would be able to keep up,” says Michael Sherwood, Las Vegas’ CIO.