So Long Boston!

I has been 9 intense months since I left Barcelona for MIT. Time has now come to move back to Europe and engage in the last 6 months of my PhD, focusing on a last round of rigorous data analysis, defining an overall coherence and writing the dissertation. My stay at the SENSEable City Lab produced a fair list of highlights and professional satisfactions including:

• the organization of a round table on real-time cities
• the publication of a paper in IEEE Pervasive magazine
• the lead of a project to communicate my research in the Design Museum of Barcelona
• the lead of a project that developed methods to quantifying the evolution of the attractiveness of the New York City waterfront
• complete the core elements of my thesis that helped me frame its overall coherence

I communicated results of my research work at AAG, GIScience and Tourism Statistics, but enjoyed almost as much responding to the invitations of the non-academic venues where I could express my skepticism, thoughts, questions and critics that do not fit in traditional academic outputs:

• Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation, Barcelona
• Visualizar Database City, Madrid
• Forum Chronos, Paris

All these different activities, symbol of a hybrid researcher at the crossroad of multiple domains, certainly taught me a lot. I can highlight the most obvious.

• collaborating with architects and urban designers, learn some part of the language and their practice
• learned some of the challenges that urban planners face with their expectations and shortcomings in the development of responsive cities: Digital Technologies to Shape the Future of Urban Transportation Planning, Why Real-Time Data Are Not Used to Improve Urban Systems? and Manuel Castells Talk on the Implications of Networks on Urban Planning.
• learned some urban data analysis techniques and some more in data mining techniques
• challenged and improved my project management skills with the experience of coordinating a complex project that involved local authorities and providers of urban data.
• explored some of the ideas on post-occupancy evaluation in a real-world setting.
• use of multiple language and references to participate to discussions that aimed at shaping urban informatics
• experimenting with inductive strategies and research based on urban demos for data collection.

Relations to my thesis: My stay in Boston provided me the necessary boots to finish my PhD in 3.5 years with a good set of skills that I plan to use after the defense of my dissertation. The affiliation with the MIT SENSEable City Lab has helped opening doors and I cannot thank its director Carlo Ratti enough for giving me the opportunity to engage into research with one of the finest team that studies the relations between ubiquitous technologies and the city.