Projects

You should email me a couple sentences about the project you choose and your team by Sep 12th. Can can change projects/teams at any time; just drop me an email if/when you do. This page has some ideas, but feel free to come up with something else (perhaps by browsing the data here: http://data-cityofmadison.opendata.arcgis.com/).

Fall of 2019 Projects

Past Projects (Spring+Summer of 2019)

Key Projects

Our collaborators in the City of Madison have specifically expressed interest in these projects; thus, doing a good job on one of these projects has a greater chance of having a real impact on decision makers.

Streamline Bus Routes. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) will introduce many new routes/stops (see this report). This new service will decrease the relevence of existing routes, so it may be possible to streamline. This project will involve evaluating/predicting the changing importance of old routes as the new routes come online. Data/Resources:

Minimize Traffic Accidents. Can we identify the main causes for accidents (e.g., drinking, specific streets, etc)? And then suggest ways to reduce such accidents?

State Street Pedestrians. Can we visualize pedestrian and bike patterns around State Street and correlate with traffic patterns? Can traffic cycle timings be better optimized for pedestrians?

Voter Registration and Turnout. What factors affect participation across the city, and how might get out the vote (GOTV) efforts be improved in the future?

Other Ideas

Data Quality Survey: much of our data is incomplete and ambiguous. Can we develop a systematic way to measure the quality of our data and identify weak points? How useful are reported addresses (as they are formatted) for geo-coding?

SalarySim: a lot of variance across years comes from salary spending changes resulting from hires and retires.

Ideas from NYU CUSP

Feel free to checkout their capstone projects here.

Resources

Feel free to send me links you think would be generally useful, and I'll post them here: