Hi all,

In addition to the Eyebeam event next Thursday, the following two talks are right up Meat Street- check it out:

For the next two Tuesdays at Studio-X NYC, we’re exploring the city through the lens of technology. Join us to talk all about data: how you can use it for urban research, as well as the inside track on who owns it, who wants it, and who sells it.

To begin with, on Tuesday, March 20, we’re excited to welcome back Fast Company‘s Greg Lindsay and the Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend for the second in a series of events casting a much-needed critical eye on “smart city” hype.

X-Cities 2: My Life Inside Big Data: Power Struggles in Information Security, Open Government, and the Real Time Milieu
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 6:30-8:30pm
Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick St., Suite 1610 (map)

Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.

In the past decade we’ve cycled from an Orwellian response to 9/11, locking down public data access, to an open data movement that promises to transform government. In both cases cities have been at the nexus of discussion and policy. Now we are on the precipice of another shift in the data landscape with the emergence of pervasive real time sensors, arriving in the form of mobile devices.

Special guest Sean Gorman, founder of GeoIQ, will cover his voyage through these shifts – from navigating the threat of university collected open data being classified by the government, to starting an open data crowdsourcing site funded by the government, and then to trading beer for data in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. What kinds of scenarios will the new streams of data emerging from mobile devices and social media create, and what will their impact be on the city?

Sean Gorman is the founder of GeoIQ, a collaborative web platform for geographic data analysis. Previously he was in academia as a research professor at George Mason University and before that a graduate student at the University of Florida. In between he worked for startups in the DC area building online communities, providing Geo-IP location, and mapping telecom infrastructure.

And, on the following Tuesday, we have:

Social Media For Urban Research
Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 6:30-8:30pm
Studio-X NYC (map)

Social media are increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives, from connecting with friends and sharing images to exploring cities through location-based applications. These new services have given us a different vantage point from which to understand, explore, navigate, and geographically record the places we live.

This panel discussion brings together academics, professionals, and journalists who are researching, building, and using social media data to better understand our urban environment. How does the introduction of place-based social media affect our relationship to the city? Who’s creating these data points and what can it show us about how the city is used? How can large private data sets be used for a public good?

Join Studio-X NYC and the Spatial Information Design Lab for a conversation about the potential of social media in urban research, featuring Sarah Williams of the Spatial Information Design Lab, Brett Martin of Sonar.me, Blake Shaw of Foursquare, and other speakers to be announced.

Also on display, Here Now! Social Media and the Psychological City

Sites such as Foursquare and Facebook allow us to spatially mark our explorations in the city, creating rich databases that hold digital imprints of our interactions. For this exhibition, the Foursquare and Facebook Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) were used to access location-based data to determine where social media users broadcast that they are “Here Now.”

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.