Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies and Planning

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11.521 - Spatial Database Management and Advanced Geographic Information Systems

Class Project Presentations

5:00 – 6:30 pm, May 15, 2014, Room 9-251

During the second half of the Spring semester, students in 11.521 have worked on projects that exercise some of the skills and methods they have learned about spatial database management, GIS, and spatial analysis.  We appreciate the project advice and collaboration that we have received from Tim Reardon (senior Planner at MAPC) and Marc Breslow (Environmental Management Consultant), and from MIT PhD students Shan Jiang, Jingsi Xu, and Yi Zhu. Here is the synopsis of Thursday’s presentation schedule:

(1) Singapore Neighborhood Amenity Characteristics:  This group includes Zelin Li, Roberto Ponce Lopez, and Fei Xu. They have developed new measures of neighborhood  accessibility and amenity characteristics for use in hedonic models of housing prices.  The measures use Singapore data about travel patterns, proximity to common amenities, and  ‘SpotRank’ cellphone data from SkyHook that measures cellphone ‘presence’ within 100x100 meter grid cells.   

(2) Massachusetts Driving Patterns and Carbon Tax Implications:  This group includes Kassie Bertumen, Ben Golder, Elizabeth Irvin, and Diego Laserna. They have utilized the newly available public dataset recording 37 billion miles of travel by Massachusetts motorists to examine the spatial pattern of annual vehicle miles and to estimate the spatial and demographic implications of a proposed revenue-neutral carbon tax that would rebate all collected taxes back to towns on some form of per-household basis.