Will we have rainbows day after day? Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be.
In uncertain times one thing I am sure will be is London remaining a global centre for geospatial thinking. One of the biggest pluses of having our UK offices in London and Leeds is the chance to work with some of the world’s best academics and students. The Geolytix team were with Leeds University students just this Monday. And last Friday I was with Masters and Phd Students from around the world at a hackathon hosted by Kings College.
Dr Yijing Li is group lead at the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), a joint endeavour between Kings College London and New York University (NYU). She was kind enough to invite me to help judge the latest CUSP hackathon. This brought together 13 teams of students from Kings, NYU, Peking U and Abu Dhabi. It was great to hear them report back on their work on using data to support a sustainable London.
After each team had walked us through their findings and recommendations I was struck by a number of emergent themes.
- Whenever you try and model any human outcomes at small scales affluence nearly always trumps (sometimes overwhelms) other affects.
- Students quickly discover age-old truths about data wrangling; missing values, data typing, incompatible definitions, outliers… Still tripping us all up same as when I was a baby analyst in the 1990s.
- Techniques like correlation matrices, linear regression are still the first go to, but the availability of standard modelling packages seems to dominate students approaches.
- Repurposing software from adjacent spaces to create new approaches is a fascinating development. I particularly like the use of Blender to analyse 3-d building datasets.
- Confident presenters are rare, and when you see one they stick in the memory. Top tip… get good at presenting as early in your career as possible.
Congratulations to all the teams and also thanks to my fellow judges. Hearing from the next generation of Spatial Data Scientists is always joyful. They will have to navigate the coming (make no mistake it is coming) AI revolution, they will be the ones that ensure we have rainbows day after day.
Blair Freebairn, CEO at GEOLYTIX
