Bostonography in Action

On Feb 24, 2025, Prof. Fang Fang invited Trevor Uptain, the lead AI engineer from MedicareVox, as a guest speaker in her INSH 2102 Bostonography class. His talk, titled “Smart Cities: Impactful Tools,” explored the opportunities and challenges brought about by the rise of AI. He also led a hands-on coding workshop, guiding students in developing a data-driven tool to improve the process of finding polling locations in Boston.

Course description for Prof. Fang’s class “Bostonography: The City through Data, Texts, Maps, and Networks”: Data is everywhere: news media fill stories with supporting statistics, adver-tisers use our browsing history to offer products, public agencies project society’s future needs, politicians make speeches and write bills, the public votes, and we all use social media. How can we use these data to learn more about society? Exploring complex data and learning from it requires a number of skills that we will be developing in this class, through the lens of Boston.