Open Data Lightning Talk Showcase

Come to the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation offices at 2 MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn for a series of lightning talks, each of which explores how open data interacts with aspects of everyday life. Afterwards, join us for a happy hour a few blocks away at Sound & Fury Brewery and Kitchen (141 Lawrence St, Brooklyn).

These lightning talks will cover projects on the price of groceries, picking public schools, deciding delivery routes, applying to city jobs and compliance for small property owners. Full details of the talks will be added as they get confirmed.

Andre Debuisne “Using Open Data to accurately generate hyperlocal delivery routes in NYC”
Hudson Shipping Co generates its own delivery routes using in-house optimization technology. Part of the input data comes from NYC Open Data, which helps the last-mile operator find the best route for a given day, based on road conditions, planned street closures and many other data points.

Adrian Liang “Applying to NYC’s public high schools by harnessing NYC Open Data resources”
Every year, over 70,000 NYC public middle school students take part in the high school application process. This involves researching and deciding what programs to list on applications from over 900 possible high school program choices. NYC-SIFT aggregates public data from over 20 different datasets found on NYC Open Data and NYC DOE InfoHub. This talk will include a discussion of relevant datasets, how this data is organized, and how students and parents use this data to make informed decisions during the high school application process.

Charles Ludwig “One Search, 4,000+ Careers: Unifying New York’s Public Sector Government Job Market”
Navigating public service careers shouldn’t require checking ten different websites. This talk explores the development of NY Gov Jobs, a unified platform that aggregates over 4,000 active salaried listings across NYC City agencies, New York State, CUNY, SUNY, the MTA, public health systems, and the NYPL. We’ll discuss the technical challenges of normalizing data from multiple jurisdictions and how a single, browser-friendly interface can democratize access to public sector employment.

Shiva Muthiah “PriceWise – A community-built grocery price database for budget-conscious people”
This talk will demo the tool PriceWise (https://www.pricewise.nyc) — a community database of food prices that helps people digitize purchase receipts and draws from NYC Open Data to connect them with stores and neighborhoods. As New Yorkers struggle with inflation, this tool aims to help them work together to pool pricing information.

Parris Taylor “From Transparency to Decision Infrastructure”
New York City has achieved something rare: a deeply structured, publicly accessible regulatory data ecosystem. But access is not the same as usability, and transparency is not the same as prevention. As an operator managing real assets in NYC, I’ve seen how DOB, HPD, FDNY, and DOF datasets remain difficult to operationalize for small property owners. Compliance still requires interpretation, coordination, and judgment across fragmented systems. This session explores how open data can evolve from static reporting to structured decision support. Using Brick, a compliance tool that helps identify regulations, as a case study, we will examine entity resolution across BBL and BIN identifiers and the role of AI in translating public datasets into building-specific risk signals and guided action.