UPDATED: Feb. 14, 2020 at 6:21 p.m.

Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies is working with the city of Syracuse and Microsoft to more effectively analyze data about the city.

Student volunteers involved in the partnership, which is one of four in the U.S., work with the city to gather data about its municipal departments, said Arthur Thomas, associate dean for academic affairs at the iSchool.

“The city has essentially engaged us as a form of employees who can assist them in the information technologies that they are trying to put into place,” Thomas said.

The iSchool’s partnership with the tech giant and the city is part of Mayor Ben Walsh’s Syracuse Surge, a $200 million initiative to further economic growth in the city through technological development.

The city government sends data from different departments, including fire, public works, police, parking and finance to the iSchool, where teams of students organize it into visual dashboards using Microsoft’s Power BI software.

The dashboards represent the data in charts that show trends throughout the area, said Aditi Agrawal, an iSchool graduate student and one of the project managers for the Microsoft initiative.

“People can look at our dashboards, and within seconds they will know what’s going right, what’s going wrong, what’s happening, what’s not happening, where they have to put more resources and how they can improve their operations,” Agrawal said.

Much of the city’s data is recorded in Excel spreadsheets that don’t visibly display any relationships or trends, she said.

The ultimate goal of the initiative is to upload all of the dashboards into a Microsoft Cloud that city employees and Syracuse students can access and analyze, Agrawal said.

“The city has a lot of data to make sense of,” said Sam Edelstein, Syracuse’s chief data officer. “As we enter a world where even more data comes through censors and other methods, we knew that we needed help to make sense of the information that was coming in.”

The Microsoft Cloud will allow the city government to better service the community, Edelstein said. The data will give officials a sense of challenges and opportunities present in the city, and will support projects and initiatives to address those areas, he said.

One of the projects the city plans to use the dashboards for is creating interconnected streetlights that provide more sustainable light, Thomas said. iSchool students could use a Power BI dashboard to analyze when most people are on the streets and route lights to be brighter or dimmer at certain times, he said.

The software the iSchool is using in the partnership, including Power BI and Microsoft Cloud, are forms of emerging technology that are used in workplaces all over the country, Agrawal said.

“The tools that Microsoft is providing us with are very strong data visualization tools right now,” she said. “If (students) are getting to learn these along with the cloud, any company would want to hire them later down the line.”

Students will all have access to the cloud where the data is stored and will work with real clients in the field to deliver solutions for the city, Thomas said.

“At the iSchool, we can assist a city that ordinarily may not be able to have as great access or understanding of the leading edges of technology and help make a more sustainable, operational community,” he said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Aditi Agrawal’s name was misspelled. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on February 12, 2020 at 9:09 pm

Contact Maggie: mehicks@syr.edu | @maggie_hickss