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Technology and Resilience: Creating Smarter, Safer Cities (Open Classroom)
3:00-6:00pm225 Terry Ave. N | Room 110
Open Classroom
Technology and Resilience: Creating Smarter, Safer Cities
Event date: June 12, 2019
Event time: 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. “The Urban Commons: Urban Informatics and How Data and Technology Can Transform Our Communities” with Professor Dan O’Brien, Director of Urban Informatics Program and Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice; Co-Director, Boston Area Research Initiative
Many have heralded the arrival of “smart cities,” but wherein lies their promise? Prof. Dan O’Brien will discuss the challenges and opportunities that data and technology offer for cities as he describes the burgeoning field of urban informatics. Dan O’Brien will illustrate urban informatics through an extended study of Boston’s 311 system, which enables constituents to report issues in public spaces, like potholes, graffiti, and litter. This project provides insights on a number of levels, from how urbanites take care of their neighborhoods to the potential and limitations of “civic technologies” and other tools associated with smart cities. Overall, the talk will highlight the way that modern digital data can support a new wave of research-policy collaborations that can advance both scholarship and policy on cities.
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Reception with light refreshments and hors d’oeuvres
5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. “Hardware, software, firmware: new approaches to resilience across policy fields” with Professor Daniel Aldrich, Director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University
Societies struggle to mitigate and respond to a variety of shocks, including natural hazards like hurricanes and flooding and manmade ones such as terrorism and cybersecurity. Too often our governments fall back on standard operating procedures involving hardware based responses. Yet a growing body of research underscores the need for software and firmware based ones which involve sustainable, bottom up, and locally based strategies. Using countering violent extremism, cyberterrorism, and natural hazards this talk demonstrates an alternative set of toolkits for governments.
Location: Northeastern University—Seattle
225 Terry Avenue N, Suite 300
Seattle, WA 98109
Free and open to the public. Registration Required.