For an article which ran in the Midwest Edition of the Sunday New York Times, I analyzed the effect of the 2010 Chicago transit cuts on waiting times and late-night bus and train service. Comparing the results against Census data on race, class and public transit use, the data suggested no evidence of discrimination.

To complement the analysis, I generated maps of the waiting time and designed and built an Ajax web app to let readers interact with the data themselves. If you don't know Chicago, I suggest putting in a central address like "Madison and State" and trying some of the train lines in the dropdown, or a bus like the 6 or X28.

Picturing Transit is a site of maps relating to the Chicago transit system, built with data gathered from Google Maps.

The site focuses on maps of travel time and effective speed (in miles per hour) to and from downtown Chicago, at rush hour and late at night respectively.

It was also the first place that Luke Joyner and I posted our analysis of the 2010 Chicago service cuts, which were subsequently covered by news sites like the Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Gapers Block and Outside the Loop Radio.

Professor Vanja Dukic and I have been combining data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the US Census, Google Flu Trends and a few other free databases to investigate the connection between air travel and flu rates.

When the paper for this project has been published, more description will be forthcoming. In the mean time, please enjoy these two large maps of air travel density and the coupling of flu rates from several cities or this abridged map of the entire U.S. air travel system.

My project with University of Chicago Professor Gordon Kindlmann centers on using Bayesian inference to compare techniques in diffusion-tensor MRI.

To complement the research, I wrote a framework for performing medium-dimensional numerical integration in C while specifying models of diffusion MRI techniques in Python. To assist in the research, I created a novel visualization method to allow many techniques to be compared at once.

Work is ongoing, and when the paper for this project has been published I will post more information.

While I was employed at the University of Chicago MacLab, I built a system to track free computers to make the lab easier to use at peak times.

As lab patrons log in and out, their machines silently register themselves with a central web server, which draws a map of the Lab with a blue tile if the computer is in use and a yellow when if it is free. The system is on display on monitors around the lab.

To make maintainance easier, the map of the lab is parsed from a spreadsheet, so that as computers are moved around or are replaced a simple change to the spreadsheet will update the server.