Community GIS
Researched the need
Led the development
Led a workshop
MakerGhat -
Teaching
Mentoring
ACM SIGCHI summer school - New Delhi Expanding the Horizons of Human-Centered AI
Hosted by Google, Microsoft Research and SIGCHI
Led a session on the work at MakerGhat
MakerGhat - IIT Bombay
During the summer of 2019 I interned at MakerGhat, a maker-space serving the urban poor of Bombay through a partnership between IIT Bombay and Georgia Tech. I worked on a variety of projects at both MakerGhat and IIT Bombay and attended the ACM SIGCHI summer school Expanding the Horizons of Human-Centered AI in New Delhi.
1. Community GIS
Led a team in architecting, designing and developing a GIS (Geographic Information System) to share civic data with the citizens who it impacted. Government and IIT Bombay research data on road quality, water access and sanitation was converted into Shapefiles, a geospatial vector data format, and uploaded to the online repository and visualization tool we built.
I met with the a number of university labs at IIT Bombay and KJ Somaiya College of Engineering to understand the research data they wished to tag geospatially and share. Pictured here is the CTARA lab at IIT Bombay.
Here is the development team in our workspace, taking a break to eat together. Development work was divided between building the Community GIS platform and tagging civic data geospatially to create Shapefiles.
We architected a solution that used Geoserver and PostgreSQL hosted on a server at IIT Bombay as our backend repository for GIS layers. The frontend was built using Geonode, Django and Leaflet.JS and used existing Geoserver web services to communicate with the database.
This is the repository of geospatial layers that can be tagged to aid with filtering and sorting.
This is an example of the visualization map data for a single layer.
Click here for the current, live version of the website. *Note this project is ongoing and the nature of the website may change
2. MakerGhat
Besides working on the Community GIS project I mentored young adults, taught English and led a workshop on GIS applications for social sciences.
The Makerghat community
Teaching English to gradeschool children
Visited homes
Led hikes and other events
3. Expanding the Horizons of Human-Centered AI
Attended the ACM, SIGCHI summer school Expanding the Horizons of Human-Centered AI in New Delhi. Led a session on the work at MakerGhat and was also an MC and student volunteer.
This event was hosted by Google, Microsoft Research and SIGCHI