In a joint effort funded by the National Science Foundation, scientists from Northeastern University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to build a public mobility data platform for the Boston area that will help neighborhoods and communities use cellphone-generated data to address issues of social equity, racial and socioeconomic segregation, economic development and climate resilience.
The COVID-19 pandemic and contact tracing demonstrated that cellphone-generated mobility data can be essential for understanding how people move around and interact with society on a daily basis. However, these cutting-edge data have been accessible to only a handful of data scientists as they are both very complex and sensitive.
The new initiative called Mobility Data for Communities, or MD4C, of Northeastern’s Boston Area Research Initiative, Burnes Center for Social Impact and MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab aims to change that.
