In an article this weekend, The New York Times takes a look at New York City's Office of Policy and Strategic Planning, a small team of data-science specialists that combine public data with brute server power to help city agencies get a little smarter. In the last three years, they've guided city workers to trees felled by Hurricane Sandy, tracked bootleg cigarettes, and directed understaffed housing inspectors towards the most urgent fire code violations.
They're working with the same Bayesian data-mashing techniques as companies like Microsoft and Foursquare, but as a city agency, they've got a lot of data to work with: over a terabyte of public archive information, ranging from tax returns to building code reports. From there,...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/25/4146086/nycs-geek-squad-combines-public-agency-info-with-big-data-techniques
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