Event Report: The PolisGnosis Project: Enabling the Computational Analysis of City Performance

On 9th June, the Urban Big Data Centre hosted a seminar with Mark S. Fox, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Director of the Centre for Social Services Engineering, and a Senior Fellow in the Global Cities Institute.

Professor Fox is also a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and was a founding member of the Robotics Institute at Carnie-Mellon University. Additionally, as a founding Director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems, he led one of the largest efforts in the United States focused on extending and applying Intelligent Systems, including Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research, to engineering and manufacturing problems.

The event started with a welcome and introduction by Professor Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah, Director of the Urban Big Data Centre. Professor Fox then began his talk “The PolisGnosis Project: Enabling the Computational Analysis of City Performance” where he discussed metrics used by cities to evaluate their performance, such as ISO 37120, which contains over 100 indicators for measuring a city's quality of life and sustainability. His talk focused primarily on research by the PolisGnosis Project, which aims to develop theories, embodied in software, to perform analysis in order to understand how and why a city's indicators change over time, and how and why cities differ from each other.

We were very pleased to share this talk with members of the public and look forward to producing related events in the future. If you have suggestions on topics to be covered, please email ubdc@glasgow.ac.uk.