SpaceTimeLab wins Shanghai Open Data Apps (SODA) Future Star Award
On Nov 8th 2017, the International Open Data and Urban Innovation Summit was held in Shanghai, China. SpaceTimeLab Director Professor Tao Cheng joined a panel discussion on “building the ecosystem for data innovation: transportation as example”. At the end of the summit, the awards ceremony of the 2017 Shanghai Open Data Apps (SODA) data challenge took place, during which SpaceTimeLab was presented with the Future Star Award.
SODA is a flagship data innovation challenge organised by the China Industrial Design Institute (CIDI) and SODA DATA Tech, supported by both Shanghai Municipal government and China’s central government (http://shanghai.sodachallenges.com/?lang=en). SODA presents a great opportunity for academic researchers and start-ups to access data from the Chinese government and corporate partners, to create innovative business solutions across a variety of categories including finance, security and transportation. In the SODA 2017 challenge, over 30 datasets totalling over 2TB of data were made available.
The SODA challenge process spans five months from Jul to Nov– from registration, development of a proposal based on sample data, access to full data sets to develop a demo or prototype, and final judging. The research team of SpaceTimeLab was one of the 15 winning teams from an initial pool of hundreds from all over the world.
The product SpaceTimeLab developed is a demonstration system for optimising bike-share docking station location and the operation (provision and re-balancing) based upon one month of MoBike data in Shanghai. This system can help bike-sharing companies to optimize their operations and save cost. A smaller number bikes can be used to serve the same level of demand, reducing the occupation of public space and minimizing the disruption to existing traffic. The product was judged to have great potential to improve the booming bike-sharing industry, both in China and worldwide.
Figure 1 The 2017 International Open Data and Urban Innovation Summit
Figure 2 UCL SpaceTimeLab wins the SODA “Future Star” award
Figure 3 Group photo of the SpaceTimeLab 2017 SODA team members