International School:
Data Science for Sustainable Cities
Montevideo, Uruguay — Field Research & Cross-Cultural Urban Analytics
While I cannot share full datasets or course materials from the program partners, this field school fundamentally reshaped how I understand data-driven planning as a human practice, not just a technical one. Working alongside students and faculty from Uruguay, Italy, Colombia, and the U.S., I experienced how different cultural assumptions about cities, climate risk, and public trust shape the interpretation of the same model outputs. This 3 weeks journey revealed that understanding a city’s challenges requires understanding the social frames through which people read evidence, negotiate uncertainty, and reason about interventions.
This experience deepened my commitment to human-centered interaction with urban data: not treating analytics as authoritative abstractions, but as tools that must be interpretable, contestable, and adaptable to local cognitive environments.
- Applied Urban Analytics & Risk Interpretation: I conducted field and computational analyses on climate adaptation, tourism dynamics, and urban risk using Bayesian and hierarchical time-series models. But the most important lesson came from watching how planners, community members, and students from different countries reasoned through these models—what they trusted, questioned, or reframed. It taught me that urban analytics is inseparable from the sense-making practices of its users.
- Bioinformatics Outreach Chatbot (Co-development): In collaboration with a bioinformatics PhD student from UFSC, I helped design a retrieval-augmented chatbot that explains epitope site concepts to the public. Beyond technical development, the work became an exercise in cross-disciplinary translation: understanding how experts construct meaning, how non-experts seek coherence, and how interaction design mediates that gap.
(And on a completely different note—I even tried bouldering in Uruguay. America, you really spoiled me. How is the same grade suddenly twice as hard over there?)