Presenter: Zoe Voss Lee (MIT) In this speculative design workshop, we ask: What if our data infrastructure lived in our neighborhood parks, schools, or community gardens? What if a data center didn’t just store files, but also used its excess heat to warm a public pool in the winter? What if your neighborhood’s digital history […]
Presenter: Apurva Jhamb Centered on Brooklyn, the event will showcase a series of data-driven maps and visual narratives created using NYC Open Data datasets related to housing, land use, landmarks, environmental conditions, and neighborhood change. The session will demonstrate how public data when paired with thoughtful design can move beyond technical analysis to become an […]
Presenter: Nate Cooper (Kingsborough Community College) In this session, learn about the NASA Space Apps Challenge, NASA’s global data hackathon. Each year NASA posts 11 challenges to use its data in unique ways over the course of a weekend. Last year, there were over 100k participants globally. You’ll meet participants from last year’s hackathon including […]
Presenter: Lauri Goldkind (Fordham University) This is a one-day in-person drop-in, office hours style session aimed at human services professionals and similar public sector staff to learn about ways that Open Data and AI might be used to help their organizations, and to share experiences and challenges they currently face. The session will include hands-on […]
Presenters: Kierstin Gray, Dr. Sará King and Katie Rouse MindHeart AI is a liberatory technology company centering the neuroscience of well being as a catalyst for intergenerational planetary healing. We create trauma-informed technologies that allow individuals to cultivate the necessary awareness to design sustainable pathways to well-being across personal, social, professional and collective communities. Utilizing […]
Presenter: Sasha Richardson (CUNY Graduate Center) The Black Knowledge Erasure Dataset (BKED) is a research archive designed to document how AI models like GPT-5 and Gemini distort Black history and culture through specific “hallucinations”. Rather than viewing these errors as random bugs, the project frames them as “epistemic erasure,” where algorithms invent authorities or omit […]
Presenter: Masaru Kakutani (CUNY Graduate Center) This presentation is designed to show how anyone interested in actionable policy can, with the help of generative AI, quickly create convincing stories. This demonstration is designed to help anyone who is interested in generating clear policy suggestions using NYC Data. A standard generative AI will assist in developing […]
Presenter: Lisa Mae Fiedler (MTA) The MTA’s dashboard, metrics.mta.info, which is built entirely off of open data, is going through a major redesign in 2026. We’d like to collect user feedback to better understand features and visuals that the civic tech community would want. Bio: Lisa Mae Fiedler manages MTA’s Open Data program.
Presenter: Michael Freedman Crashcount.nyc is a public, open-data–driven tool that uses NYC Open Data and AI to document and contextualize traffic crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists, with the goal of supporting safer-streets advocacy at the neighborhood and district level. This session will demonstrate how publicly available NYC datasets—particularly traffic crash data—can be transformed into clear, […]
Presenter: Mike Spade (The Knowledge House) 35 years after slavery, Du Bois set out to provide a definitive image of the Negro condition in the United States. His data efforts not only quantified economic parity or lack thereof, he also focused on where people lived, and how they lived. During the 1900 Paris Exposition, he […]
Presenter: Ray Brescia (Albany Law School) This presentation will explore the power of gamification and then describe one current work in progress, an online game, “Haunted Housing,” that is designed in partnership with community-based advocacy organizations in New York City to educate youth, particularly from immigrant communities, about housing rights. Gamification can be utilized in […]
Presenter: Merlin Valdez VoteFeed.org is a Twitter/Bluesky-like user experience that allows constituents to interact with their respective U.S. representative in congress by sharing their opinion on policies up for vote in the legislative agenda. Bio: Merlin Valdez is the founder of VoteFeed, a digital civic engagement platform built to help constituents understand how their representatives […]