Data Science for Urban Sustainability (UEP-0238)

Spring 2025 · UEP 0238 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

With rapid urbanization, the development of data science, machine learning, and the emergence of ubiquitous sensing technologies, cities have become the foci of multidisciplinary investigations. This course is designed to equip future planners, data scientists, and policymakers with computational methods and tools to acquire new urban data from social media, crowdsourcing, and sensor networks, and use them to represent, understand, and visualize complex urban environments in comprehensive and scientific ways, to make informed decisions to design, plan and manage smart, sustainable and resilient cities. This course is the second half of a one-year series of spatial data science for solving urban challenges. Building upon the toolkits and technical skills (such as Python NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib, and SQL etc.) that students learned in "Urban Analytics and Visualization" or other introductory level data science courses, this course is composed of two parts. • The first part will introduce students advanced topics, methods, and tools in spatial data science for urban sustainability with 3 Labs and 2 Assignments. • The second part will provide open-ended projects for students to work in pairs/teams. These real-world projects are developed with research collaborators (including New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, and Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization -- Central Transportation Planning Staff) whose decision-making impacts the development of communities and cities. Students will apply methods learned in the course to collect, manage, and analyze new and traditional data to develop plans to measure the impacts of human activities and development on urban sustainability. Each team will present their project findings and solutions to the collaborators at the end of the class. This course can also be useful for students to work in conjunction with their theses or capstone projects.

Course codes: UEP-0238, UEP 0238, UEP0238, UEP-238, UEP 238, UEP238

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