30 hours, 20 gigabytes of data on Montreal City operations, 23 hackers, one driving question: how can we improve Montreal?
Over the weekend of Nov 11, CSCDS and the McGill Office of Innovation partnered with the Ville Intelligent de Montreal and the Business Development Bank of Canada to run Datascapes 2017 - a data analytics hackathon. Unlike traditional hackathons where the objective is to build software, the goal of Datascapes is to dig into data for insights.
This year, the focus was the City of Montreal. Ville Intelligent graciously provided five datasets on everything from vehicle registrations to firefighter calls. Four teams spent the weekend analyzing, processing, modeling, and visualizing - looking for ways to understand the challenges and opportunities for Montreal through the lens of data.
On Sunday afternoon, teams presented their results to a panel of judges with a wide array of expertise - from tech consulting to software development to financial modeling. Insights included anomalous trends in vehicle registration, a deep dive into downtown traffic patterns, issues with bicycle data collection practices, and more user-friendly ways of logging citizen complains.
Thanks to all participants in Datascapes 2017. Thanks also to our sponsors, Business Development Bank of Canada, Accenture, Google, and CEIM. Looking forward to Datascapes 2018 next year!
