Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics

Mentors: Student: August Fu

For years, the government has struggled to provide helpful information for residents in need. Sometimes the resources are not readily accessible, or the channel of communication is simply missing. Many people have questions about government policies but don’t know where to ask or never bother to read through official documents; instead, they end up getting incomplete or misleading information from the web. These issues call for a system that handles queries on a large scale with high efficiency and consistency - this is where large language models (LLM) come into the picture. With the help of exciting tools like LlamaIndex, we are now able to extend the knowledge base of LLMs like ChatGPT to more specific domains and tailor the model’s responses to be more relevant to the residents’ needs. This project will extend ChatGPT’s knowledge base with specific government data (such as pdfs of housing policies) and provide a frontend interface for user to interact with a ChatGPT-style chatbot. In addition to the ability to chat and ask questions, users will also be given the power to evaluate responses of the chatbot by giving a thumb up/thumb down to the response.

Mentors: Student: SarahA

We want to build an audio tour application that highlights sites visible from MBTA's (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) public transportation routes. Each tour consists of a mixture of crowd-sourced audio clips produced by Bostonians and MONUM's staff members. As the user moves along the route, the audio will automatically play based on their location. This project aims to research, design, and implement a backend system for this application, including the APIs the client will use and AWS infrastructure, managed with the AWS CDK, that will support those APIs (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3).

Mentors: Student: Sebastian O.

This proposal is to assist the City of Boston in achieving in equity goals, either by helping implement a city chatbot powered by large language-learning models, building a dashboard for equity in city infrastructure, or expanding translation for the city’s 311 app with machine learning.

Mentors: Student: chiragmahapatra

The goal of this project is to build a web-based dashboard that allows City departments to keep track of infrastructure investments and measure their equity across different neighborhoods. The Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics is focused on creating innovative and equitable services for the residents of Boston. The proposed dashboard will help City departments monitor their infrastructure investments, analyze and visualize trends over time, and identify any disparities in the distribution of these investments. The dashboard will be built using frequently updated open data and will include a map-based view of infrastructure investments and various charts to spot trends. The project will be built using the latest technology in GIS and web mapping platforms. The proposed dashboard will be a valuable tool for City departments in measuring and improving equity in their infrastructure investments. The project has the potential to improve the quality of life for residents of Boston by identifying disparities in the distribution of investments and helping City departments to address these disparities. The project will also serve as a model for other cities looking to measure and improve equity in their infrastructure investments.

Mentors: Student: Salihu

The Problems I am applying to solve are: 1. Building a Tool for Collecting Crowdsourced Ideas on Interactive maps, this is supposed to help people from the community suggest ideas to be built or improved upon by the community 2. Building a dashboard for Equity and City Infrastructure, this is supposed to help the city understand how their investments are impacting the community and help understand how to better equitably invest in infrastructure I plan to build a very accessible, customizable web app with with an interactive map, geolocation capabilities, that allows users to pick locations and suggest ideas to be built or improved on by the city. The app will be serverless and simple to use for the everyday person. The users of this app should also be able to see other ideas that have been suggested and contribute their thoughts on each idea in some way and to help the city understand how these investments are impacting the society and how to more equitably and favorably distribute funds