Winners of Plowing Through the Data Hackathon Announced

The winners of the Plowing Through the Data Hackathon, powered by AT&T, were announced in a ceremony held at the School of Information Studies (iSchool) and attended by City of Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh.

Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh thanks hackathon participants for their work as iSchool Dean Liz Liddy and City Chief Data Officer Sam Edelstein look on.

The hackathon, organized by the iSchool, the City of Syracuse and AT&T, brought together over 90 participants across 36 teams who worked with datasets from the city’s fleet of snowplows. Participants included community members as well as Syracuse University students.

Snow plowing and snow removal issues have been a significant priority for newly elected Mayor Walsh, and the city’s Innovation Team has led efforts to use new technologies to improve how the city addresses these issues.

 “We are excited about the level of engagement that AT&T and the iSchool have stirred in the community,” says Corey Driscoll Dunham, director of operations for the City of Syracuse. “I’ve reviewed creative and promising submissions that we can implement in our communication of routes and priority areas.”

The winners of the hackathon are:

First Place: Dean Olin and Alex Sinfarosa. Their project allows the city to see where roads have been plowed and the amount of time elapsed since they were last plowed.

Second Place: Michael Phillips. Phillips’ project provided a way for community members to easily search which streets have been plowed and at what time. Phillips is a graduate student at Syracuse working on his M.S. in computational linguistics in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Third Place: Suchitra Deekshitula, Anish Nair, Ashmin Swain, Rahul Sarkhel and Shikhar Agrawal. This group of iSchool graduate students crafted a project that looked into the analytics related to plowing, focusing on how much work the trucks were doing at different periods of time, and attempted to build a route optimization algorithm for the trucks.

The first-place team received $3,500; the second place team winner $2,000; and the third place team received $1,500.

“The quality of the innovative solutions developed for this challenge is extremely impressive and serves as an example of the strength and creativity of Central New York’s technology community,” says Marissa Shorenstein, president, Northeast Region, AT&T. “AT&T is proud to have collaborated with Mayor Walsh and Syracuse University to host this challenge. We applaud them for embracing how technology and data can be used for social good as tools to assist municipalities to address issues impacting their residents, similar to what AT&T provides every day through our Smart Cities solutions.”

“We’re pleased that we could again work with AT&T and the City of Syracuse to make a civic data hackathon happen, and that we had the opportunity to apply the concepts we teach our students here at the iSchool for the benefit of the community,” says iSchool Dean Elizabeth D. Liddy. “I am thrilled that many Syracuse University students took part in the hackathon, and that members of our faculty took the time to serve as mentors to participating teams.”

iSchool alumnus and City of Syracuse Chief Data Officer Sam Edelstein was involved in the hackathon planning as a member of the city’s Innovation Team.

“Smart cities collaborate with the community and their anchor institutions and strive to use data to make decisions,” Edelstein says. “Applying this thinking to snow removal, and seeing the results from this Plowing Through the Data hackathon will help us get better and ultimately deliver better service. All of these projects were impressive and prove that when we release data to the public, people will take it and find creative ways to interpret it to benefit everyone.”

About Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic heart of New York State, with a global footprint, and nearly 150 years of history, Syracuse University offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of Syracuse University is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit www.syracuse.edu.