I was a participant in a hackathon called Code and the City. The event was held in celebration of Open Data Day. Along with industry sponsors like Soti, Amazon, Microsoft and Cisco, the event sponsors included the City of Mississauga and Sheridan College.
The idea was to answer a problem set that would benefit the City of Mississauga with a population of almost 800,000 using open data:
How can Mississauga gain greater awareness and engagement with the community in a digital environment?
My approach was to address something that I feel affects all cities: Lack of communication between the city and the community. There is no present system where the community can share their problems, comments and solutions to the city in a massive and automated manner. With my previous exposure to text mining, natural language processing and machine learning, I created a proposal that would surely benefit the city. I am currently brainstorming to contact other cities as well that would be interested in implementing the system. Please see my brief PowerPoint presentation attached in the link below: