API requests for urban data

The phrase “API calls” often sounds intimidating to people with little experience in data analytics. But, honestly, it doesn’t take more than 5 lines of code to do an API request. In this post I am showing how to access urban data through APIs. Specifically, we will get information about New York City’s restaurants through the Yelp API, and fin... Read more 27 Jun 2019 - 2 minute read

How I got a stress-free PhD

Many argue that the PhD years can be one of the most stressful periods in one’s life. In fact, recently academics decided to come together to recognize and address the issue. (Good job Nature!) In my case, getting a PhD was far from that. Here I put together a list of things that helped me finish my PhD smoothly, without compromising my mental... Read more 03 Jun 2019 - 7 minute read

AI and Civil Engineering

We live in an era where buzzwords such as “artificial intelligence” or “deep learning” are gaining increasing interest from the general audience, not only the academic community. There is no doubt that we are part of the fourth industrial revolution, and tech giants are investing billions of dollars in AI research. Same applies to academia, e... Read more 04 Jan 2019 - 1 minute read

A new method to grade buildings on energy performance

As the discussion on the effects of anthropogenic climate change builds up, local and federal governments worldwide are designing policies to “green” existing building stocks. Recently, New York City enacted a law mandating large building owners to publicly display their energy performance grades, as a means to increase the appreciation of susta... Read more 24 Oct 2018 - 4 minute read

Expression of emotions in literature through big data

In this post, inspired by this very interesting work, I process Google 1-grams to analyze patterns in English and German 20th century literature emotions. I try to replicate the paper’s results and extend the method to other languages. I am showing how to process large-scale text data using functional programming and without loading entire file... Read more 14 Oct 2018 - 4 minute read