Getting a grasp: from statistical analysis to real-time monitoring

Due to many people observing the holiday on Monday, we will be moving this month's meeting to Tuesday. It may actually be nice for a lot of our members who struggle to make it on Mondays. Same week, same awesome people!

Our hosts will need a list of members by Friday 11, so please RSVP early. We will all be heading over to the Tippler for after-drinks at 9pm if you can't make the full event.

Raz Schwartz [@razsc (https://twitter.com/razsc)] is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech and a Magic grant fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Raz studies social media usage in urban settings and focuses on examining local social interactions by applying computational social science methods. You can find Raz's work at http://tech.cornell.edu/raz-schwartz/ . Tonight he'll be presenting,

CityBeat - Reimagining Local News in the Real Time City

How can we make sense of the massive amount of live geo-tagged information that is now available from various social media platforms? How can we use Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare real time data to better understand the pulse of the city? In this talk I will present CityBeat a real time event detection and city wide statistics multi-platform application that sources, monitors and analyzes hyper-local information from multiple social media platforms. http://thecitybeat.org/

Jane Stewart Adams [@thejunglejane (http://twitter.com/thejunglejane)] is a Masters candidate at NYU CUSP, with a degree in Emergence in Complex Systems from NYU. Her research is in emergent computation and collective information processing in complex systems, from ant colonies and biological and artificial neural networks to cities. Tonight she'll be presenting KrigPy, a spatial interpolation library for Python, refactored from the R gstat package. KrigPy has the major functionalities of the gstat package: variogram modeling; simple, ordinary, and universal point or block Kriging, sequential Gaussian or indicator (co)simulation; variogram and variogram map plotting utility functions.

You can find the project on GitHub (http://github.com/thejunglejane/KrigPy), it will be released by the time of the meetup.

Ekene Ijeoma [@ekeneijeoma (http://twitter.com/ekeneijeoma)] does design, development, research and strategy for interactive media, object, installations and spaces. He has studied at RIT (BS), Domus Academy (MFA); resided as an artist at Fabrica; practiced in NY, LA, London, Amsterdam, Milan; instructed at Parsons, and critiqued at Yale.

Ekene focuses on looking at data through the lenses of design. At the moment he’s working with Lisa Strausfeld’s at Bloomberg Visual Data, to design and prototype new meaningful and beautiful products around news and data.

Tonight he’ll be talking about The Refugee Project (http://therefugeeproject.org), a project done in collaboration with Hyperakt (http://hyperakt.com/) which reveals the ebb and flow of global refugee migration over the last 4 decades based on the UN’s and UNHCR’s data. It also expands and reflects on the data, telling the stories about socio-political events which evolved into mass migrations.