Smart Communities

City buildings in the night time with blue and magenta streaks emanating from them.

One of IST's core research directions is deeply understanding how to improve the quality of life of diverse populations in local communities, ranging from neighborhoods to businesses and governments. By leveraging state-of-the-art data mining and machine learning methods, we aim to empower community-based organizations and residents through novel theoretical frameworks and technologies. In this direction, we discover hidden patterns and new knowledge underlying the dynamics of urban and rural communities, citizens, and institutions, in order to design superior technical solutions that can benefit people at large. Through these approaches, we aim to make local communities' technological infrastructures smarter and to improve the well-being of residents in diverse communities.

Subfields:

  • Community Informatics
  • Crisis Informatics
  • Geospatial Computing
  • Smart Cities
  • Sociotechnical Systems
  • Urban Computing

Associated Faculty: