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Furthering Our Understanding of the Link between Health and Environment in an Urban Setting

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

There is an increasing focus on geo-spatial linking of the large data sets related to both health and the environment at the urban level. For the last several years, I have been leading a team to build the Kinder Institute for Urban Research Urban Data Platform (UDP) to study the greater Houston area. Similar to many open government data platforms, the UDP hosts a large amount of data across many categories for the Houston area. The objective is to build up a system that helps to understand how residents live, work, learn and play in the area. In this discussion, I will demonstrate the use of the UDP resources coupled with advanced space-time statistical modeling to further our understanding of the link between air quality and health. This knowledge has led to improved management of childhood asthma faced by over 6000 students in the Houston Independent School District. I will close with how the UDP system is facilitating environmental sampling in the post-Hurricane Harvey recovery period and offer insights on developing a space-time cumulative environmental map for the area.

Mathematics; Statistics; Computer science; Data mining

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Rice University

2018-04-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65689

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/