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Award

Yeah! for History and GIS: PhillyHistory Receives a 2011 Award of Merit

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We’re excited to announce that the Philadelphia Department of Records has been awarded a 2011 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for their PhillyHistory.org project.

Now in its 66th year, the Leadership in History Awards from AASLH are awarded annually for projects that demonstrate excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history.

Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood or your house looked like 50 or 70 years go?  The photographs and maps on PhillyHistory.org enable you to discover more about the history of Philadelphia and its many neighborhoods and communities.  Take a stroll down memory lane at: http://www.phillyhistory.org/

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Robert Cheetham Receives Public Service Achievement Award from Common Cause PA

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On December 6, Robert Cheetham received a Public Service Achievement Award from Common Cause Pennsylvania.

Robert Cheetham with Chris Satullo (L), News Director for WHYY Radio, and Barry Kauffman (R), Executive Director of Common Cause Pennsylvania

“A hundred years from now, people will look back on the kinds of things Azavea is doing as the next step in the civil rights movement—giving people the tools to watchdog and fight a government that ignores the public interest,” James Browning, the Associate Director for Development in the Mid-Atlantic Region for Common Cause, told Technically Philly.  “On issues like redistricting reform, which can cause eyes to glaze, Redistricting the Nation makes the issue clear and compelling.” (source: Technically Philly)

We want to share this award with our staff and clients dedicated to making our government and democratic process more transparent.   Projects like Common Cause’s Our Philadelphia; Committee of Seventy’s Online Citizen’s Guide and Election Day Incident Mapping; MAPLight’s Remote Control report; George Mason University’s public District Builder redistricting software; and Redistricting the Nation are reminders that brave organizations are out there fighting to preserve one of our most fundamental civic rights: the right to participate in and protect our democratic system.  Thank you.

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Aaron Ogle Joins the Inaugural Class of Code for America Fellows

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It is our pleasure to announce that Aaron Ogle, the Javascript and walkability ninja from our Land Records team, was selected with 19 other fellows out of a pool of over 360 applicants to join the first class of Code for America Fellows.

Code for America was founded to help transform city governments through better use of information technology.  Inspired by the highly successful Teach for America program, “Code for America works with city officials and leading web development talent to identify and then develop web solutions that can then be shared and rolled out more broadly to cities across America.” Starting in January, Aaron will take a leave-of-absence from Azavea for a year-long fellowship to work on projects that will help city governments better leverage the power of the web. We wish Aaron the best!

Read more about why Aaron applied to be Code for America Fellow.

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Azavea Named a “Winning Workplace” by Inc. and Winning Workplaces

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This past June, Inc. Magazine and Winning Workplaces announced the winners and finalists of the 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition – the best small and mid-sized places to work in the country. We’re thrilled to announce that Azavea was a finalist in the national list of 40 winners and finalists.

And guess what?… one of our benefits even got noticed in the Inc.’s  “10 Perks we Love“.  Go to slide #6 to discover which one!

Over 500 completed applications were submitted by U.S. companies for the contest.  A national panel of experts in leadership and small to mid-sized business judged the finalists based on specific metrics and qualitative assessments of their success in creating the kind of workplaces that engage employees and deliver successful results.  The common characteristics of the Top Small Company Workplaces winners and finalists include a commitment to aligning their workforce with a clear vision, mission, and values; communicating with openness and trust; and investing in employees’ continuous learning and development.

A_BCorp_logo_POSThese values align with Azavea’s recent B Corporation certification, which resulted from a comprehensive survey meant to verify the company’s social and environmental performance standards, as well as its commitment to creating benefit for all its stakeholders.

Inc. Magazine writes about Azavea, “This 24-person firm prides itself in its ability to hire smart people to engage in intellectually challenging work that has real social value. Their interdisciplinary approach in a relaxed work setting allows them to consistently create highly crafted, user-friendly web solutions solving tough geospatial problems. Leadership generously shares profits with employees and continually challenges them to pursue their own research projects to stretch their abilities and open up new avenues for the firm.”

So far in 2010, Azavea was also named a 2010 ESRI Business Partner of the Year and was in the 2010 Inner City 100 List of 100 Fastest-Growing Inner City Companies Nationwide

We are grateful for all these accolades. These would not have been possible without our dedicated staff, clients, and partners. Thank you all.

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Azavea Wins SBIR Grant to Build a Web-based Urban Forestry Application: OpenTreeMap

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usdaThe Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program supports small businesses with inspired ideas with federal grant funding for research and development (Phase I), and product commercialization (Phase II) purposes.  Azavea has received SBIR grant funding in the past to develop HunchLab, our crime analysis, early warning and forecasting software; DecisionTree, our web-based planning and prioritization system; and GPU-based geoprocessing optimization (see next article).  We are pleased to announce the award of a new Phase I SBIR grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support the development of a web-based urban forestry application we are calling OpenTreeMap.

Across the country, millions of citizens are passionate about greening their communities by planting and caring for trees. But they lack the tools necessary to work together, observe progress, and manage information over time.  Azavea’s OpenTreeMap will build on the success of other wiki-style applications such as OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia by enabling the public to collaboratively and efficiently detail and map the entire street tree population in their urban neighborhoods.  They will also be able to provide input on the health or overall condition of each tree, its species, and its approximate size through the use of online tutorials.

phs_logoThe City of Philadelphia will serve as the test location for the prototype OpenTreeMap application.  The prototype will first be accessible to participants from a wide variety of government, non-government, and volunteer organizations. Philadelphia is typical of large urban environments in many ways, and therefore an appropriate case study as we develop OpenTreeMap for a publicly nationwide use.  Azavea will be collaborating on this project over the next six months with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, who will provide the necessary data sets and urban forestry expertise.

The potential for a wiki-style map database where citizens and local governments can collectively build a tree inventory is very impressive.  Urban street trees have been proven to increase energy efficiency in urban locations by providing valuable shade in summer and wind abatement in the winter.  They also protect our nation’s waterways from the pollution of urban stormwater runoff by intercepting rainfall and helping to channel it back into the atmosphere.  It is our hope that OpenTreeMap will provide a web-based interface for the collaborative inventory of trees that will be as helpful to students and volunteers as it is functional for government and environmental organizations involved in the daily management and replenishment of the urban forest.

This project was supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Grant Number (2010-33610-20937).

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Azavea Makes the List of Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies Nationwide… Again

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Thank you so much for your support and trust!

For the second consecutive year, Azavea made it to the ICIC Inner City 100 List of the fastest growing companies nationwide, at number 28.  And the Philadelphia Inquirer claims that “Azavea puts Philadelphia on the Map“.

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The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful companies and their CEO’s as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities. The list is intended to demonstrate the idea that doing business in an urban environment holds a distinct competitive advantage. ICIC (Initiative for Competitive Inner City) has been studying the economic condition of the largest 100 American cities for more than a decade and is working to revitalize inner cities across the country by promoting entrepreneurship.

We want to dedicate this award to all of clients, our partners and our talented staff.  Thank you.

We look forward to working with you on more thought-provoking projects and software that continue to bring together the best aspects of geography and the web.

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Azavea Makes it to the List of Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies Nationwide, at Number 13

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"Our firm was founded on the idea that location-based technologies can help promote the emergence of more dynamic, vibrant communities. So we feel proud and honored that our work and contributions are being recognized."

We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded placement in the top 25 companies on the Inner City 100 list, a ranking of the 100 fastest-growing businesses in inner city communities nationwide. The competition was fierce, with 5,000 businesses from across the country nominated in 2009! The InnerCity 100 is issued by The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and BusinessWeek Small Biz magazine. Now in its 11th year, the Inner City 100 provides unmatched original data on the fastest growing inner-city businesses in the U.S. Azavea was ranked 13th according to its 5-year growth rate (from 2003 to 2007) of 647%.

Philadelphia can be quite proud! Among the top cities represented in the 2009 list, Denver has seven winning companies and Boston, Philadelphia, Oakland, and San Francisco each have four companies on the list. Other Philadelphia companies that made the list include: Amuneal Manufacturing Corporation (51), Stroll (62), and Perryman Building and Construction Services (94).

The list is intended to demonstrate the idea that doing business in an inner city area holds a distinct competitive advantage. ICIC has been studying the economic condition of the largest 100 American cities for more than a decade and is working to revitalize inner cities across the country by promoting entrepreneurship.

Robert Cheetham, our president and CEO says, “It is a tremendous privilege to be part of this list of thriving companies. Our firm was founded on the idea that location-based technologies can help promote the emergence of more dynamic, vibrant communities. So we feel proud and honored that our work and contributions are being recognized. We see our urban location as a competitive advantage with assets that include access to public transit, relatively short commutes for our staff, a major airport hub, a richly diverse cultural environment, strong academic institutions and a reasonably priced real estate market. We look forward to continuing to make a difference in Philadelphia’s communities and around the country.”

Want to know more about the 2009 Inner City 100 winners? The winners grew at a compound annual growth rate of 40% and an average rate of 324% between 2003 and 2007. Collectively, the top 100 inner city businesses have employed nearly 17,000 people and created nearly 10,000 new jobs over the past five years

Learn more about the top 25 companies of the 2009 Inner City 100 winners featured in the spring issue of BusinessWeek magazine.

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ESRI President’s Award 2008 Awarded to City of Philadelphia’s MOIS GIS Applications

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"The President's Award ... is a special recognition to an organization that is "a model for others to follow in implementing GIS successfully as well as making a positive impact on the environment and society."

Jim Querry of Division of Technology accepts award from President Jack Dangermond

At the ESRI User Conference earlier this month, the City of Philadelphia was presented with the President’s Award by Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI. The President’s Award is given to one organization each year and is a special recognition by Mr. Dangermond to an organization that is “a model for others to follow in implementing GIS successfully as well as making a positive impact on the environment and society.” Previous winners have included the U.S. Department of the Interior, the City of New York, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, and the Hong Kong Information Center. Though the award is seldom given to the same recipient twice, this is the second time the City of Philadelphia has received the award (the last time was in 2000).

The award was accepted by Jim Querry, the Director of Enterprise GIS for the City. The award was presented in the Plenary Session of the annual ESRI User Conference in San Diego before a crowd of more than 12,000. Several efforts were cited including: the public crime mapping web site, PhillyHistory, the work order management system at the Streets Department, a new mobile GIS system at the Airport, the Unified Land Record System, CityMaps and ParcelExplorer. We’re happy and proud that some of Azavea’s work was part of this recognition for the innovative GIS work being done by the City of Philadelphia.


To read more about the award ceremony visit the ESRI User Conference blog here.

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Azavea Wins Another Prestigious SBIR Award from NSF for HunchLab – Leveraging Spatial Statistics to Validate Human Intuition and Fight Crime

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"The ability to detect and analyze changes in the geographic patterns of crime and disorder is an innovation in policing which holds the potential to enhance the organizational capacity of police departments across the country."

Just over a year ago, we proudly announced that Azavea had been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the development of our HunchLab product, a set of innovative software tools that scour the current and historic data of a police department, search for changes in geographic patterns, apply spatial statistics to test for significance, and send alerts to relevant law enforcement personnel. Today, we are thrilled to announce that NSF has awarded us Phase II funding to further development of this software and its commercialization.

Our Phase I project proved the feasibility of building the application, and the Phase II project will refine the application and build additional functionality, including alternate workflows for different user types, developing a new user interface, expanding the alert infrastructure, and building text mining capabilities. The result will be a commercial version of the software.

Preventing crime is a more sophisticated task than simply mapping incidents or arrests and deploying resources accordingly. The ability to detect and analyze changes in the geographic patterns of crime and disorder is an innovation in policing which holds the potential to enhance the organizational capacity of police departments across the country.

HunchLab was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. Read our white paper for more information. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this ‘data mining’ service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, enabling analysis of the result. .

Although HunchLab will initially be developed to assist with crime detection, tools such as the Spike Detector and HunchLab are applicable in any application where events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns, real estate sales, and property and mortgage fraud.

HunchLab is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0750507).

This is the fourth time in two years that Azavea has been awarded an SBIR grant. Previous awards were SBIR Phase I awards from the National Science Foundation, the U.S Department of Education and the U.S Department of Agriculture.

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Azavea Receives ESRI’s Foundation Partner of the Year Award

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"...this award is a tribute to both Azavea's staff and the clients with whom we collaborate. "

We are proud to announce that we have received the 2007 Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) Foundation Partner of the Year Award for the Philadelphia region. ESRI gives the award to the partner who, through hard work and dedication, has consistently built a strong, dependable relationship with ESRI and has made a contribution to the community through its work with GIS technology.

We’re honored and proud to receive this prestigious award from ESRI. We strive to leverage ESRI’s leading edge server products such as ArcGIS Server and ArcWeb Services, and this award is a tribute to both Azavea’s staff and the clients with whom we collaborate. ESRI’s products have enabled us to implement innovative approaches to geographic analysis, geocoding and web-based applications. Azavea’s solutions for digital asset management, geocoding, political advocacy and decision support all benefit from our strategic partnership with ESRI.

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SBIR Grant Award Announcement: HunchLab – Leveraging Spatial Statistics to Validate Human Intuition

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As part of their daily activities, police officers often formulate hunches based on observations and other sources of information. Large amounts of crime data already exist in electronic form, so officers have been using information management systems and visualization tools to help sift through this data. Despite the availability of these tools, hunches remain difficult to confirm or deny.

We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation recently awarded Azavea a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to design and evaluate ‘HunchLab’, a prototype system that will enable police officers to develop and evaluate hunches.

‘HunchLab’ was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this ‘data mining’ service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, enabling analysis of the result (learn more). Although ‘HunchLab’ will initially be developed to assist with crime detection, tools such as the Spike Detector and ‘HunchLab’ are applicable in any application where events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns and real estate sales.

‘HunchLab’ is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0637589).

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SBIR Announcement

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We are proud to announce that Azavea has been awarded a research grant with the US Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. Last year, Azavea teamed with the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab to create a web-based application called schoolBase for the School District of Philadelphia. It was designed to allow users from the school district to visualize their vast quantity of data using maps and charts to aid in critical decision making. With an interest in creating a more open system that could easily be adapted to the particular needs of school systems around the country, Azavea applied for a Phase I SBIR grant from the US Department of Education. As the name implies, these grants are designed to fund truly innovative research and development that small companies might not otherwise undertake. Azavea’s grant, one of only about 35 awarded by the US Department of Education, will help fund research into improving the user experience and extending our Kaleidoscope framework to cover educational data. If our research indicates a potential for a commercialization (as we believe it will) we will be eligible to apply for a Phase II grant, in which we will receive funding to more fully develop and market the product.

This project is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the U.S. Department of Education, Contract Number (ED-06-PO-0929).

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Extending Economic Development Tools to Rural America

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As some of you are perhaps aware, Azavea has spent a great deal of time developing ways to make advanced geographic technology more accessible to professionals who could benefit from its use. One of the ways we have done this is to create a framework for weighting geographic variables to aid in decision-making for a variety of practical uses, among them public health, economic development, and open space planning. We call this framework DecisionTree, and it has grabbed the attention of many professionals and academics who use geography on an everyday basis. Recently the federal government expressed their interest in the project, by awarding Azavea a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant. Through this prestigious grant from the United States Department of Agriculture, Azavea will perform research and development aimed at developing a DecisionTree application for use in rural economic development. Learn more about how we applied this framework to the City of Philadelphia using ESRI’s ArcGIS Server product to support urban economic development.

This project is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), Grant Number (2006-33610-16777).

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