The Ken Steif Lecture: Clio Andris

Clio Andris is an associate professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Friendly Cities Lab and conducts research on geographic information science, social networks, spatial networks, and geovisualization. 

Points of interest (PoI) are locations or landmarks such as food services, health facilities, education facilities, and entertainment venues. City planners use PoI data to capture amenities in local areas, assess design plans, measure the economic health of an area, learn about change over time, and visualize sites on maps. PoI data is sourced from places like the Yellow Pages, OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Yelp, and government registries of businesses. With advancements such as public crowdsourced reviews, mobility data, and text analysis methods, we can enrich PoI data with information that reflects the value (e.g., a favorite restaurant with local cuisine) and role (e.g., a hangout for teens) of PoIs.

This talk reviews three initiatives to help planners and the public get more from PoI data. These projects answer the following questions: (a) Does this place attract a diverse clientele in terms of race and income? (b) Is this restaurant a local chain, national chain, or an independent restaurant? (c) Does this place tend to support family, professional, romantic, and/or friendship relationships? The goal of this research is to help the public make better decisions when choosing a destination, and to help planners capture how their city is being used. Each of the initiatives are based in U.S. cities, and have open web tools to allow the public to explore and interact with these PoIs on a map.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.