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How a Northeastern professor is using big data to address urban inequities

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What do you see when hundreds and thousands of tiny dots are positioned together?

Painter George Seurat saw a Sunday in a park in the middle of the Seine river.

Northeastern University professor Daniel O’Brien sees a city.

“We live at multiple geographic scales at the same time — your property, your street, and as you move up you’ve got the neighborhood, the whole city and the region — and that’s a lot like the way a pointillistic painting is organized,” explains O’Brien, a professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. 

“It’s dots that come together to form objects and those objects are organized to form the full image,” he says.

Continue reading at Northeastern Global News

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