Participants of the Great Mathematical Workshop conduct an urban study of the Soviet District

The Great Mathematical Workshop is a project of the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, whose participants can try themselves in the role of a researcher in a few weeks, working with real customers.

At the two intensive weeks, 29 teams presented their design work. Many of them plan to continue their research and write scientific articles on the topic of their project. Among the projects are “How to teach artificial intelligence to “feel” the composition?”, “Development of parallel algorithms for a mesoscale weather forecast model”, “Machine extraction of meaning fr om text and its applications in the tourism business”, “Geometry of nodes and topology of fractals” and many others...

Danil Taranets, a 2nd year student of the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (MMD), and Nikita Ogleznev, a graduate of the MMD, in a team with Anastasia Mikheeva, a student of the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, are working on the project “Digital Urbanism. Clustering of Urban Objects”. Its goal is to create a "design game" to take into account public opinion. The essence of the "game" is as follows: on a virtual map, local residents place indicator icons with attributes of the urban environment (for example, parking lots, playgrounds, places for walking dogs) where, as the townspeople think, they lack them. Based on the general picture of voting, a database of territories with which it is necessary to work is formed. These services will provide design bureaus with new tools to enable stakeholders to participate in urban improvement at an early stage.

Despite the technical complexity of the implementation of our project, its global goal is not the development of algorithms, but the attraction of residents to the development of the surrounding urban space. We believe that we will be able to show by our example how even a small community can change a city for the better and contribute to the popularization of urbanism in Russia, — said Danil Taranets.

The team had to solve several problems. First, find out what city data is available and how you can use it. Then the task was set to work with the data provided by the townspeople.

It is not easy to get such a dataset, and we are still working in this direction, — Anastasia Mikheeva shared. — At the moment, the first version of the site has been developed, wh ere residents of Akademgorodok can leave tags and comments with wishes for improving the urban area. Now increasing the interest of residents in the project is our main task, since the methods and algorithms for processing are already ready. We also plan to move from analytics to forecasting, but this, again, requires a large set of data.

The work was started back in 2018 as part of the hackathon of urban projects from the Greenhouse of Social Technologies in Kurgan by the project customer, system analyst at "Host IS" Group Ekaterina Danilina and the project curator, ITMO postgraduate Anna Avdyushina.

— Our project at the moment is more about finding solutions — this is the most difficult moment. The participants and I often had brainstorming sessions and tried many different methods, — said Anna Avdyushina. — Of course, there was little time for us, but all the tasks were solved, despite the fact that they moved away from the initial setting. Now we are very intensively engaged in deploying the system and filling the service with new functionality, after the back of the system is ready, we will begin to load with all the analytics that we created at the workshop.

At the moment, a website has been developed, with the help of which residents of Akademgorodok can leave tags and comments with wishes, the team is also considering options for promoting the project. Nevertheless, offers of cooperation are already being received from city activists, sociologists, statistical services of Novosibirsk and local media. The collected data will help to better understand urban processes in Russia and bring the service to a state that will help in promoting the desires of residents.